


Procedural

by KhamanV



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Gen, PG-13 Violence, Science Fiction, Thriller, casefic, hard case crime, not graphic but there is a battle scene and a bad guy getting the snot whacked out of him, once abandoned and ten years later by god finished
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-27
Updated: 2019-03-27
Packaged: 2019-12-25 10:31:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 25,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18259469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KhamanV/pseuds/KhamanV
Summary: Before both a career at C-Sec and the Normandy come into his life, a young Garrus strives to make a name for himself as a criminal investigator. But when a stakeout on a major arms smuggling case goes bad, he has to deal with the consequences of being the one to survive.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fic that was begun in 2009, during the original release period of the first Mass Effect game and accidentally abandoned a little over a year later, one chapter shy of being completed. This now-completed fic is a warning to all future abandoned WIPs that I _will_ come for your ass. Eventually.
> 
> This is an enhanced, updated, and fully rewritten version, that contains not only that forgotten epilogue but an extra new chapter, too. A full changelog would contain notes like 'upgraded side characters with a personality.' 'unborked considerable amounts of exposition,' and 'i don't know what the fuck I was thinking here, but we fixed it.'
> 
> There is a lot here that remains curiously relevant as I switched fandoms into LOST and then, today, the MCU. A love of casefic, a tendency towards agents doing their best, a lot of emotional study. It may not be as relevant today, a decade on from the heyday of the fandom, but I hope someone gets a kick out of it.

_Procedural_

_“He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.” ~ Seneca_

1.

This is the job, and Garrus Vakarian never complains: Fourteen weeks of paperwork just to track the suspect through multiple jurisdictions, scant but exciting hours of rustling grunts who were shocked and shamed to realize they had abetted a crime, and then the watchdog operation to see what their target did next. Then came the waiting. Followed by more waiting. It was the waiting that threatened to sneak under his skin, but he’d been prepared to be in that phase for the long haul, so he sucked it up. It was the nature of the job, the slow-beating heart under the bone, and Garrus loved all of it.

He’d let his partner, Seiuus, throw himself into the fun part. Going undercover and presenting himself as a bare-faced arms buyer, layers of expensive temp-skin hiding his family marks. It left Garrus to do what he liked best, preparing the real meat of the investigation. The dance that made up the final capture, the stakeout, the dusty solitude of necessary prep. At night, alone, waiting for the end, he let his neckflesh hackle to show a modest amount of private pride in his work. Sure, Garrus had risen up the civic ranks right after bootcamp like a rocket. Nobody gave him squawk about it, nobody rose that high if they couldn’t handle it.

Nobody _needed_ him to prove himself. Yet none of that, in that same, almost secretive privacy under the open sky, stopped Garrus from thinking about his father. About his father’s history with C-Sec. About how, deep down, the man always wanted _more_.

Garrus had his own ambitions he wanted to live up to, although he knew they would always be caught up under the elder Vakarian’s broad shadow. Too much pride wasn’t his way, the family way, but ambition? Oh, he had a little. A modest dose, he would say. Just to keep him motivated. To match what had come before - and then, maybe, make a little of his own trail.

At the back of his mind dug the request to both the colony Primarch and to Citadel Ops. He knew he was still young. Too damned young to be making that jump for C-Sec already. He was three years out of boot, and only one year of it had been on civic investigation. All of it petty-crime local - except for this one. This one was the trailblazer. It was going to matter. It was the first chance he had to prove his chops in a world where his father’s name alone would never take him far. Turians rose and fell on their own merits, their own pride, their own loyalties. Well, that was their life, bound up in duty.

Tonight, by those old rules, it was going to be his superior officer’s ass if the arrest failed. The thought made Garrus go cold all over. It brought him back to ground.

Well, that and the hard rock wedged tight against his bony, thinly-armored ass. He risked a wiggle now and then for a more comfortable position that didn’t exist, trying to not scrape the Haliat sniper rifle against the orange stone barely hiding him from sight. He’d try again later, and he’d fail later.

Garrus had been queezed into a tiny niche all night with his only company being his own breath, hissing silent and stale in the enviro-helm, and his own rattling thoughts. He was in the best vantage point for a stakeout, selected by his own perfectionist methods.

Worst place to sit on the whole beshitted rock.

Spirits bless, in time, he would probably come to hate the waiting. There were hours left before the deal would go down, even before any advance security flew by to be sure the scene was clear for dirty business. On reflection, he should have brought a book.

. . .

Seiuus landed on the scene right on time and just after down. The small, two-seater rovercraft they’d appropriated from lockup dropped into a neat landing at its designated location. A tall stand of jutting orange stone in the center of an unremarkable crater. The meteoroid they were on was airless, unindustrialized, and a clean hop away from Palaven itself. Probably not the first illicit thing the rock had witnessed. Spirits willing, maybe this would be the last.

Garrus raised his head an inch to see his friend and his partner, making damn sure he still had that perfect sightline to be sure it was all going to go down just fine. He smiled, unable to help it, at the sight of him.

Seiuus was a flamboyant, cocky turian with a set of foul jokes collected from every edge of the galaxy, a warped outlook that gave him a bad rep even among some of his own family, and a fondness for reveling in his own carefully cultivated bad taste. It had gotten him knocked around more than once during boot. Garrus had, not to make a pun, taken him under his wing, realizing that trying to change his fellow soldier was not only futile but something neither of them wanted, and found ways to to turn Seiuus’s exuberance into a benefit.

Camp command hadn’t been convinced by Garrus’s pleas, but a few unorthodox yet wildly successful turns in some high-impact combat simu tests got Seiuus dropped into Garrus’s comparatively elite squad permanently. And after that? Law enforcement partners that were equally effective playing off each other. Garrus was quiet and calculating, Seiuus brash and fast. It was new to Palaven, it was efficient and effective and it had been great fun so far. Less so on a few minor human deals they’d busted.

Not just one human had laughed in their faces, until one gentler crook took the time to explain the Earth cultural cliche of ‘good cop/bad cop’ to them. Seiuus, being him, hadn’t been deterred in the slightest, throwing himself more deeply into the role and collecting old human vids on the topic. They were, universally, absolutely awful and Garrus would never turn down movie night, because there was so much joy in how awful they were.

Since then, however, he’d mostly just let Seiuus deal with the rare human incident. With him out of the occasion, Seiuus’s seemingly bipolar and whirlwind approach to things shook problems out fast.

To be fair, six feet plus of seemingly - Seiuus could switch off into his affable self in a second, never actually losing control - wild, pissed-off alien was never something anyone wanted to deal with.

All of this meant Seiuus, to Garrus’s tactical mind, really was the best option to present himself to their target as a young, awkward turian itching to make some credit on the black market. Someone who had been claiming to sell off-the grid topshelf Armax, fresh out of elite military stock and guaranteed untraceable.

Garrus and Seiuus had been on the trail for four months. They wanted whoever this was, wanted them bad enough to hunt and to wait for the right moment to draw the bastard out, and that led to today.

. . .

There was still no sign of the seller. Garrus watched Seiuus fidget, his suited feet tapping light against the orange sand. Garrus understood, felt real sympathy. But maybe only a little. His own ass had long since cramped itself numb.

Finally, a slightly larger craft than the borrowed rover began to settle itself haphazardly against the sharp ridge of the crater. It was a black ship with dimmed lights. No identifiable marking. Not their first such gig, clearly. Garrus’s nostrils flared slightly. The waiting was over. Now it was time to get back to watching.

His sniper rifle was prepped with a soft shot energy pulse cartridge. Enough to stun, even hurt like the proverbial bitch, but not kill. So long as he didn’t make a headshot. Nothing in the universe made a direct hit of hot voltage to the brain less dangerous, but zapping a leg meant your target wasn’t going to go anywhere in a hurry. Maybe follow it up with a second shot in the ass, just for the irony of it. The cheek of it, Garrus might’ve said in his dry voice that many assumed was humorless. His jaw flexed at the thought of their target wiggling in the sand, muscles jumping uncontrollably. It was the least he would deserve.

The seller emerged from his ship. A short individual, it turned out. Too short for turian, too tall for volus, too stocky for quarian, and not stocky enough for krogan. That left Garrus plenty of racial options to yet pick through, but few of them walked that cocky. Probably human, though he wouldn’t vouch it in court yet. Humans didn’t corner the whole galactic market on attitude, that was true. What was also true was that human infractions in turian space were getting bolder and Systems Alliance weren’t, in his educated opinion, doing _nearly_ enough about it.

Garrus’s jaw clenched, hard enough to click. Then he made himself relax, dumping his opinions in favor of resuming focus, and watched the figure approach Seiuus. Gait suggested male. Free-moving, not older or infirm. Walking like he was in good shape. Passing his partner a common digital earth greeting - palm out, fingers extended - sealed his guess. It was polite, that offer of a handshake. He stood firm, legs akimbo, watching the undercover turian twitch and jitter like a nervous first date.

There was no sign of backup from the black ship. No sign of crates or other usual symbols of an arms deal in view. This might turn out to be a feeling-out meeting, the seller sizing up his new buyer. Get eyes on him, check his reliability. Taste the air. Seiuus’s credits would be fine, Garrus had damn near overworked himself getting a background set up for a ‘Sei Lekundus,’ a disowned and dismayed failure of a young NCO whose few saving graces included patience with volus accountants - and, more importantly, a talent for turning a blind eye to things turians generally found obscene to their civic-minded society.

Well, nobody was going to get shot in the ass today. There wasn’t enough evidence, and probably more waiting to come as the target felt his way towards a second meeting. The thought didn’t deter Garrus, not really. Patience was a universal virtue, and he was doing his best to cultivate it.

Tension rippled through his shoulders as he saw the man suddenly put his hands up, as if waving Seiuus off. Seiuus looked entreating, hunkering down to placate him. Garrus grunted to himself, ignoring the way it echoed inside his helmet. Something had taken a bad turn, and he couldn’t pinpoint why. He took a risk and flicked the modified transceiver on. It was running on low pulse energy, meaning he had a delay on what he’d hear. Not the best, but least likely to get picked up on enemy scan. If anyone else was in the other vessel. Operations meant he assumed there was.

“No, no, it’s a clean buy! I’ve got a reseller lined up less than two clicks away, far from the Citadel. I don’t know what you’ve been told!”

Garrus swore to himself, his breath hissing soft fog against the faceplate. Just in case, he leaned into the rifle, his finger dancing light across the trigger. Okay, partner. Pull off. If he gets paranoid, this is going to go nowhere today and nowhere tomorrow.

“I’m sorry, man, but my boss doesn’t like how we’re feeling. You gotta understand. Trust means a lot to him.”

Great. It gets better. We don’t even have the primary target here. Garrus swore again.

“Look, I’ve got my throat on the line for this deal. If I don’t tell my clients tonight that I can provide for them, I lose face. Do you know what that means for a turian? For me? I can’t lose anymore honor, even like this.” Seiuus pushed his weight to his other foot, head cocking downward as he made himself the picture of earnest desperation. Trying to lure the main guy out.

A sizzle-pop of static meant Garrus missed the response. The intermediary shook his head and stalked off several meters. Seiuus ran a gloved hand over his own faceplate, what Garrus considered a pointless symbol of aggravation and defeat. It must have meant something to the human. He paused, then turned back to Seiuus. “Hold on. Let me send a signal.”

The human climbed the ridge and ducked out of view behind the ship. The connection between Garrus and Seiuus cut off abruptly. Possibly normal. Just local interference, or a sender’s pulse from the ship. A trickle of worry went down Garrus’s back anyway, even as Seiuus used a hidden pad to transmit a coded ping to Garrus, a single vibration that said hold, developing situation.

Several minutes later, the ground rumbled underneath the crater. Garrus felt it vibrate through his suit as he steadied the rifle with one hand, scanning the empty horizon for cause. Then he saw why, hitting him in the gut like a rock. A much larger craft, still unmarked, still dead black, moved to hover above. Lights winkled along its bottom to mark an activating bay. A podcraft dropped from it, a small one seater.

Instinct overrode tactics, then tangled irretrievably from it. I don’t like this, he thought. I think this just got a whole lot bigger than the two of us can handle right now.

With a vessel that size in proximity above, he couldn’t transmit a scratch code for backup. All he could do was hope Seiuus could handle what was about to happen, then get himself out safely. With a single sniper to watch over him.

Someone emerged from the pod, unfolding himself from the cramped seat in a black suit that seemed to gleam with some dim inner light. Garrus squinted at the figure for a moment, realizing he recognized the ‘aura’ that came from the figure, a way of moving, a way the air interacted with him. His muscles paradoxically tensed and then went slack in shock. Biotic!

Seiuus kept playing along, dipping his head in greeting and offering an open hand towards the newcomer, an offer to continue negotiations. The figure - Garrus still couldn’t make out details beyond the mundane. Bipedal, taller than the intermediary, nothing else of note - remained stoic and cast in the crater’s long shadow. Garrus had no clear shot.

The crawling sense of unease threatening to choke in his throat, Garrus monitored the silent transceiver as Seiuus attempted again to make contact with this new presence, cocking and lowering his head, shuffling gently towards him to show his desperation. Garrus had no real biotic talent and didn’t believe in old legends. Still, he tried to send the telepathic message with all his soul - Break off, Seiuus!

It came to nothing. The black figure continued to regard him in what felt to Garrus like a dismissive silence. Then, with shocking abruptness, Seiuus was tugged in biotic stasis, casually thrown back against his own rover like so much dirt. Before he could scramble to his feet, beg, play the role any further, before Garrus could finish his silent shout of warning, the followup shot hit. Pure, concentrated energy, the signature flare of the pistol, a murder for show committed with their own illicit product. Garrus’s eyes had slammed shut, knowing nothing was going to be left of Seiuus’s head, nothing left of his life, all of it gone before he could react, avenge him, do anything. All that training, those years of readiness, Seiuus’s cocky smile, those terrible movies, those laughs. All of it gone in a second.

Stones grated in Garrus’s gizzard, threatening to drop into his belly and stir the acid there into pain fit to match the scream in his throat, a scream of loss and fury, knowing he was too alone, too helpless in his sniper’s nest to do anything but watch the ship depart with the intermediary and the faceless man that had turned part of Garrus’s life to dust.


	2. Chapter 2

2.

“So, what’s the scene?”

Seiuus casually gestured at Garrus with the infopad in one hand, lifting his shoulders in an offhanded shrug. “As you can see, we had two gentlemen conferring with each other over a minor financial disagreement.” He paced around the room, pointing out details as he went. The wet ring of a disappeared glass. The scratch on a table. The tear in a synthetic leatherette chair. “Came to a bit of a hitch over a high-profile transportation contract. They’d had some previous history. Our fellow’s been in the med shop for instability a couple of times. Twitchy.”

Garrus wasn’t impressed. “He’s a volus.”

“Well he’s an extra-twitchy volus. And, as it turns out, a pushy kinda guy to boot.”

“All right…” Garrus flicked a talon at him, suggesting he get on with it.

“Not much else to say. They argued, shoved each other around the balcony, and then… this. Mostly by accident, I’d say.” Seiuus came to a stop by the bent, open-air railing and pointed down with almost lazy sauciness. The other side of the ‘financial disagreement,’ an unfortunate older volus banker by the name of Drun, was being collected by two different reclamation teams on two different balconies below. All of the techs looked a touch pale blue around the mandibles.

Garrus had a hunch they’d be dining light afterward. He was feeling sympathetic on that score. Drun had taken a hard bounce. “Um.”

“So, in the end, I’d say the two of them decided to go their three separate ways.” Seiuus finished by looking back up at Garrus with a thumb’s up.

“ _Seiuus_!”

. . .

Garrus let the gaudy fabric catch and flutter against a talon on his left hand. His right gripped it reflexively as he stared through it. He no longer saw its bright orange and yellow patterns, instead seeing the grinning face of his partner, full of life, leaning against a balcony rail with a thumb in the air.

Almost everything personal in the room was neatly boxed up, the plastisteel and ceramic crates lined up by the wall next to the door. What didn’t go into the family’s personal storage would be picked up by a trooper, passed down to some other investigator or cadet. A way for a part of Seiuus to live on, letting his spirit guide some other young turian. _Spirits help them_ , he thought with a quirk of the jaw by way of a real smile. All that was left was a small pile of clothing and a few trinkets. Things Seiuus’s family had no idea what to do with.

At first he didn’t notice the turian child in the doorway, or his mother behind him. It was the lightly flanging, immature voice that alerted him. “What’s that?” Hard consonants still lisping against a youthfully soft mandible. Garrus didn’t remember being that young, so young to have to try to understand why his favorite uncle’s things were suddenly disappearing. Too young for that kind of aftermath.

He sharply turned his head towards the boy, startled out of his memories. The boy backed up and his mother put a hand on his shoulder, squeezing her fingers gently. Garrus swallowed, realizing his hand was still flexing around the fabric. “He said it was called a ‘Hawaiian shirt,’ Stolo.” He looked down at it, his features softening at the recollection. “Bought it off a trader we picked up for a flight-weight violation. Minor problem, good kid. Human, of course. He had a cargo hold full of pointless junk. Seiuus… Your uncle bought this to help pay off the man’s fine.”

The kid twitched a mandible, sounding absurdly matter of fact. “It’s ugly.”

Garrus rang out a laugh despite himself. It was the truth. “You know, he wore it to the office once. I mean, that I know of, that he got away with.” He shook his head, remembering. The shirt had hung off Seiuus and his wiry frame like a tacky cotton cloud. The buttons had little birds on them, something called a flamingo, and Seiuus tapped at them throughout the day, calling them ‘cousin’ in an affectionate tone of voice until another officer started to yell at him for it. Garrus put the shirt down abruptly. It hurt to look at it anymore. Something stung at his eyes.

“Are you shamed?”

“ _Stolo_!”

“It’s all right, Tulla.” Garrus forced his eyes open and gestured at her until she stopped shaking the boy’s shoulder. “He can stay with me for a little while. We can keep talking.”

Stolo’s mother let go, but she hesitated in the doorway. “Thank you, Garrus.” A click in her throat, hesitation, confusion. “What do you recommend I do with that… thing?” She pointed at the shirt in his hands.

Garrus’s mandibles creaked in an honest smile. “I’ll keep it, if you don’t mind.”

Tulla inclined her head in gratitude and left him with Stolo.

Stolo quickly wriggled his way up onto a wide container next to Garrus, plopping there and staring at him in that sharp, inquisitive way kids had. “So you _are_ shamed.”

Garrus gave him a weary look. “When you grow up, kid, you’re going to learn about a thing called tact.”

The boy sounded the word out, then discarded it with a shrug. “But you did everything right. It wasn’t your fault. You went by the rules?”

“Yes, I did.” Garrus tried to fold the messy shirt into a less messy pile on his lap. “That won’t always change how you feel about things.”

Stolo looked down at his feet, flexing one little claw and then the other.

“It isn’t about honor or duty, sometimes. Sometimes it’s just how we feel. So yes. It happened. I lost your uncle, and while by the letter of law I have no blame, I can’t help but keep thinking about what could have been done differently. What I could have done.” He paused. “Law… isn’t completely solid. Don’t tell people I said that until you’re older and think about it some. Law can’t answer our emotions. Sometimes it’s just a bright light to guide us by.”

“But… you’re getting a de-moww-tion today.” Stolo peered up at him, his voice flanging hard on the tough word. “So they think you did something wrong anyway?”

Garrus harrumphed his way through a resonant little chuckle. “Not at all.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will. They’ll teach you a lot in your first year of boot. Are you looking forward to that?”

“Oh yes!” That perked Stolo up for a moment, wriggling anew across the box before remembering he had feet and staring at them again. “But, why are you being punished? You go down ranks. Down isn’t good. Down means you misbehaved, right?” His low, phasing tone said Stolo knew _all about_ getting into trouble for bad behavior. Garrus’s mandibles quirked until his whole jaw bent into a real smile. He couldn’t remember being that young, but by the spirits, there was a piece of Seiuus alive in the child. A little bit of hell left to raise.

“Not really. It’s more like… meditation. Peace. Something bad happened, and my commanders want to be sure that I get time to work through my thoughts. Time to step back and breathe, center myself on the job. When I’m ready, I’ll go back. Up the stairs, Stolo, up and up. There’s no dishonor to a demotion like this, when we lose someone. It’s actually more like a courtesy.” _Well_ , he thought. _It probably will set back that C-Sec application by a year. Or more._

He couldn’t help but let a small sigh out to escape. Even telling Stolo the truth, there was a little bit conflict inside. His demotion was a decision meant for all, himself included, and he felt touched by that. He understood, it was part of who they, as turians, were. It didn’t mean he couldn’t feel a little rueful at the time he’d need, the time he would lose.

“You’re not happy, though.”

“Well, no. That’s part of grief. Knowing a thing doesn’t always change what your heart feels.”

“Mm.” Stolo gave a little clack of his thumb talons. “I still don’t get it.”

Garrus shook his head and gave up trying to be the family philosopher friend, gently giving the boy’s back a final pat. The hearing would be in another hour, and it was time for his thoughts to wander towards it and whatever was next for his future.

. . .

In his three years since boot, Garrus had personally witnessed nine different demotion processes. Three of them had been minor interventions, turians who had cracked under pressure and gone too far into intoxicants or other vices. They had each shaped up within months and were back on duty to this day. The other six had varying causes, some with similar roots as his current situation. Only one had permanent results which, with that same chilly turian tact, were not discussed publicly. The process itself was always brief. A listing of what troubled Command staff on behalf of the summoned officer, and a short data packet on how the turian could care for themselves and work back towards being designated fit for original duty.

Not _once_ had there ever been a human present.

To be fair, technically, this one still wasn’t. The human waited outside Command’s door during the short proceeding. Garrus spied him having a hushed conversation with his own immediate commander just before, which was odd. After? Another quick look and a curt nod. The universal consent to further discussion. Strange. Was it related to Seiuus, somehow? He couldn’t know, and it wasn’t for him to obsess over now, so he didn’t.

Now stripped of his own command of an investigate ops unit, Garrus waited patiently for further orders. He spent a day or two doing housework, straightening up his spartan quarters, getting old stains out of armor, calibrating the sights on his personal load-out kit. His self-care packet suggested a little unconstructed downtime, with a note that Command and Med would send him some further instructions soon. Not unusual, either. Squad losses usually meant psych followup.

Still, when the call did come, it was not what he expected. Rather than a med note suggesting one of Palaven’s nicer equatorial retreats, it was an order to arrive at the nearby Alliance embassy the next evening, 2100 sharp.

. . .

The voice came from behind him, crackling slightly in baritone gravel. “Agent Garrus Vakarian?”

Garrus cocked his head politely as he turned, hands clasped neatly before him in a usual greeting. “Presently just Garrus, sir.”

“Mmhm.” The human put his hand out in that strange but common greeting. He was on the tall side for one of their species, pale like a long-time spacer. Sharp green eyes. Garrus wasn’t skilled at marking human age, but this one had no wrinkles or grey on him. Middle age, perhaps. Relatively unremarkable, as they went. Garrus had done well on his interspecies courses, but males without any marks on their face still looked odd to him. If that tweaked in his eyes, the man didn’t notice. “I’m Captain Gabriel.”

Garrus thought of Seiuus, the practiced way he could handle humans on their terms, the way he himself rarely did, and finally, gingerly, offered his own to shake. The flesh felt fragile against his firmer hand, causing his jaw to quirk, just a little. He had no animosity for the species, but it was hard to get over the general, cool way his own people felt towards them. Though logic and the benefit of post-war analysis saw both sides of the Shanxi encounter, his blood still said he sympathized most with the turian legions. “Captain,” he said, staying professional.

Gabriel guided them through a nearby door and then gestured towards a chair on the other side of the waiting desk. “Have a seat. Please.”

The office was lightly furnished, made up of the smooth, buffed steel and generic fabrics that suggested it was either the cell of a cultural ascetic or, more likely, the result of an architect working overtime on a low-bid government contract. Garrus ran his gaze over his surroundings. There was the usual vidscreen on the wall, blandly tan ceramics cast over metal, a window with a junk view of a nearby government office wall, and the tiniest glimpse of hazy sky. The desk had another vid, a lamp, a computer set into its surface… nothing for him to catch a personality from. Other rooms he’d passed had plants, kitschy mugs, the usual clutter of life. The absence of facts told him Captain Gabriel was using a spare office - not a regular visitor to Palaven. By the way the human settled into that brand new chair across from Garrus, it might even be the first time he’d been to this embassy for longer than a minute.

Garrus leaned back into the chair, realizing the piece of furniture had been designed for humans. It was set far too stiffly in the seat despite his attempts to shift his weight to compensate. It took less than three seconds before he realized it was going to be his destiny to have a permanent cramp in the ass. Rather than complain, he slid automatically into his most casual investigator’s voice. “What brings you to Palaven, Captain?” _More to the point, what brings_ me _here_?

Gabriel wasn’t a mess-around kind of guy. He blanked out the vid after glancing at something and got right to it. “You ran a four month long investigation into an illegal dealer moving military-grade arms. Lost your partner on stakeout over it.”

“That is the logged summary of events. Yes, sir.” His tone stayed neutral, regaining its coolness despite himself.

“Mm.” The green eyes flicked to his, as if assessing what was there. “I’ve asked your command to give you to us as a consultant. An assistant investigator in a related matter. He’s agreed in the main, but due to turian guidelines post-incident I’m informed it’s still up to you.”

Garrus considered. It was a highly unusual request, and it implied Alliance had something to gain from him specifically. Related matter. That was a cagey way of saying there was a link here, something he and Seiuus hadn’t found. Irritation formed a pearl in the back of his throat, the idea that he missed something, or maybe something else. “My files are already open to you, I’m sure.”

Captain Gabriel cleared his throat meaningfully. “I read them. You tracked a line-form irregularity through two shell accounts because it hit a hunch. You and your partner then ran over a half-dozen witnesses until you put together that you had a major arms deal going down in your local space. Then you tracked their trails, made a spreadsheet of cargo fraud until you were sure. You also confirm in your report that you saw a biotic emerge from an unmarked black vessel with comms disruption capability.” He glanced at something on the vid. “And you personally verify that you saw military-grade Armax weaponry in use.”

Something itched under Garrus’s throat. That word. Hunch. Not what he’d have used. “Yes. I did. As you see. I’m not sure what else I can offer, sir.”

“You got that much and more in four months.” Gabriel was still giving him that searching, studying look.

_We’re talking crosswise. Do all humans do this?_ “Seiuus - my partner and I spent a lot of time on the issue. It was our primary investigation.” _Our final one. I’m sorry, Seiuus_.

The facts dropped with blunt gracelessness. “Systems Alliance has been tracking this target for two years, ever since he popped up on our grid working with a major crime ring. We haven’t cracked them, either. So we know he doesn’t like to work alone.”

Curiosity went to war with his irritation. “Who is he?”

“He’s a salarian. Lorben Krent. Dropped off the Sur’Kesh radar entirely, skipped out on what we’ve been told was a promising intelligence career. Took a good chunk of his base’s armory with him when he did. He started with that, of course, building up business the old fashioned way. Grunt work, a little murder, and a growing list of contacts. Lately, I’d guess he didn’t think the knockoffs of your gear were good enough. He decided he was going to collect some top stock and sell it for equally top prices.” Gabriel broke his stare to tap his fingers across the desk. A grainy station vid began to play on the wallscreen behind them.

Garrus turned in the uncomfortable chair to watch, getting his first good look at Seiuus’s killer. His guts and gizzard shifted unpleasantly, acid building into refreshed anger. “You’ve got his name, you’ve got _footage_ , and apparently, Captain, if I’m hearing you right, you knew he was going to go for us. But we didn’t know anything about it until now.” The acid turned into frozen heat, a talon clanking irritably against the arm of his chair. His feet flexed. He wanted to tear something. Anything. The salarian. The desk. The captain, for not telling him this before his friend died. Yes.

Captain Gabriel’s voice held no reaction to his outburst, just as dead calm as before. If someone so much as winks at Krent, he drops everything and takes off to who knows where, agent. We decided, with permission from your commander…” The voice trailed for a second, drawing Garrus back to let him see the human’s pointed look. He couldn’t keep his mandibles from flexing. “That not interfering with your investigation was our best bet. Your team got under his radar. Your team got closer to real-time information on his activities than we’ve managed so far.

“Son,” Gabriel said, and he leaned towards Garrus for emphasis. “You got a meeting. We _never_ got that close.” He snapped off the recording and leaned back again. “Out in turian space, it looks like he had fewer resources. Changed up his methods, had none of the backup he’s been enjoying the last few years. So he got greedy, took extra risks. We think that gave you a chance to get close before he shored up the gaps in his armor. That means we were doing our best, but your small team was doing a _hell_ of a job.”

The anger was still there, fading under confusion. A compliment. From humans. Who hadn’t blindly walked them into death, not in the way he’d wanted to assume. “We could use that insight of yours, agent. Get Krent taken down once and for all. Maybe even blow a few holes in his network along the way.”

Garrus didn’t miss the way Gabriel stressed his title, ignoring the demotion in a way that said everything. It meant there was an implication, something said to the human by turian command. Despite the way the human phrased it, maybe even believed, to Garrus it meant something else. He really had no choice _but_ to sign on. Anyway, by rights, the title _was_ still his. He just had no command, no current investigation as of the ritual demotion brief.

The captain, however, was telling him otherwise.

Garrus felt unease trickle through him, showing in his posture and his face. The anger still lurked. Even with the situation clarified, it hurt to know that Seiuus’s fate could have been avoided. There _had_ been a moment where the two of them could have been warned away. But he couldn’t sit on that moment forever, could he? It wasn’t the right way to honor the spirit. The spirits said go forward, so that was all he could do. Garrus dipped his head, his eyes not meeting Gabriel’s.

He saw Gabriel lean back in his seat. “I respect if you’d prefer your time away from the case, of course. Human agents wouldn’t even be permitted to work such a case under these circumstances, dealing with a loss of another agent. Your commander assures me turian tradition is sometimes pretty different. In any case, you’d be working with us directly, on board my ship as what we’re writing in the books as ‘independent consultant.’ As per turian hierarchy, you’re both agent and liaison. However, you’d also answer to me.”

Something cooled inside Garrus. It was a track in front of him. Something new. All right. “Sir, I’m at your command.”

A broad, warm smile filled Gabriel’s face, the first honest emotion so far. “For what it’s worth, agent, I have some friends in C-Sec. I understand you have an application there.”

Garrus paused, considering the implication. “I do, sir, but I believe it’s presently tabled as per my demotion.”

Gabriel shrugged. “Well, we’ll just see how everything turns out, shall we?”

“Of course sir.” It was all he could say.

Gabriel placed both hands on the armrests of his chair, signaling he was done. “Be at the shipyard at 0900 tomorrow. Bring a travel kit.”

“Yes, sir,” said Garrus with a nod.

“Dismissed.”


	3. Chapter 3

3.

First Fleet _SSV Cairo_ hung silent, always silent in the emptiness of space, within pinging distance of the local mass relay. Distant stars from distant galaxies winked at them through the unending night, veiled by wisps of the nearby red nebula. The view could humble any mortal viewer looking up from the surface of the nearby planet. To be this close, it was almost a religious experience too much for a mind to bear. Humans didn’t look out to the darkest deeps too often, not when they were this far from home. It was one thing to know they’d explored their galaxy and seen so much their ancestors could never even have imagined, and quite another to understand that there was still so much more out there they could never even hope to reach. That any given life could go so far, and it would still be nothing compared to the unconquerable vastness beyond the galaxy’s rim.

Early human spacers had been rumored to go mad at attempting to comprehend their place in the universe, finding the unknowable to be too much for their seeking minds. Turian explorers fared slightly better in their telling, going stoic, going inward, speaking only of what they had seen and learned when asked. Never answering what they thought when faced with that interminable solitude. The asari had a tale, sometimes performed as a mournful ballad, of a great generational ship that plunged out and beyond, to see how far it could go. Human navigators told each other legends that claimed that, if they listened close to the faintest channels, they could still hear the lost asari vessel singing from somewhere in the far reaches of space.

Garrus believed in no such tales, of course, but there was little else to take in to _but_ stories during long waits. The first lesson learned, learned all over again - patience is one of the investigator’s key tools. He would never be perfect at it. In boot, some of his supervisors were concerned that he had a streak of hotheadedness deep inside him that wasn’t necessary for even such young turians. But he had to say, he thought he was doing better than his human counterparts.

A third week of fruitless attempts to intercept communications and the ping-pong games the crew had invented were becoming more and more complex. When shift watches changed, a handful of them would take over one of the empty cargo bays, drop its grav field to almost nothing, and begin a ballet of ball swaps, counters, and bounce-physics that would have dazzled an advanced astrophysics student. Garrus had to admit it was pretty fun to watch.

For his part, in that long wait where they sat like old whaling vessels looking for prey, finding nothing but more time in the deeps surrounding them, he read.

Captain Gabriel had given him relative freedom onboard his cruiser. Garrus’s quarters were simple and private, with a small office annex where he studied and re-examined evidence late into the designated night-cycle of the ship’s schedule. His private computer was connected to the ship’s main network, giving him surprisingly deep access to public files, the officer comm line, an emergency line to both turian and Citadel command as per ship guidelines, and, most importantly to him right now, a full codex about Systems Alliance history and culture.

On a recommendation from one of the lieutenant investigators nominally assigned to him, he was amusing himself with the noir classics of their human culture. Seiuus would have liked that, he supposed. He was currently trudging through the canon of one Dashiell Hammett alongside a more recent author, Ezra Harrington. He found the investigations within the books themselves were often necessarily archaic - well, at least in Hammett’s. Harrington had a fondness for unrealistic skim-battle showdowns featuring interceptors and tanks manned by crudely burly heroes. They were simplistic, filled with cultural references and reliances that he lacked. Somehow he still found them amusing. Maybe even comforting. Certain things appeared to be normal in all cultures. Criminals lied where possible, and mysteries often resolved themselves to something more mundane than what they first appeared as. And the motives were _always_ simpler than expected. Greed. Lust. And that classic flaw, stupidity.

He’d noticed a recurring side theme in human literature. Most of them always seemed to ‘get the girl.’ Annoying and often overheated diversion from the plot aside, it reminded Garrus that he rarely bothered to find time for so much as a date on Palaven. On the other, Seiuus - and here the hook in his heart tugged anew - never seemed to go home alone if he could help it. Well, that was the life. His, anyway. In the end, it was the only one he could answer for.

The soft ping of a comm chime stirred Garrus from his thoughts. He pushed himself back from the screen and its old-timey tales of jewel heists and ladies with oblique smiles, shaking his head a bit to reassert him in the here and now. He hit the response key. “Yes, Captain?”

“Ops meeting, 1400 hours.”

“I’ll be there.”

. . .

Ops meetings were busywork, well-meant and intellectually useful to keep the senses sharp. Most nights, it was the same collection data they already picked through twice before, looking for a new trail to follow under the eye of a Captain who, if he held anything back from them at a superior’s command, had the courtesy not to show it. If nothing new floated to the surface or if nothing new from other sources made it to their ears, the meeting broke quickly into unstructured free time - a luxury on most ships. It became a welcome benefit here. A way to fill the waiting without the silence eating them up.

Garrus realized he didn’t want to go back and read. Not tonight. He was listless, maybe even lonely. Ghosts from Palaven followed him, sat around him in the now otherwise empty meeting hall, watching him as he knuckled his chin atop a single talon in thought.

_Are you shamed?_ He could hear Stolo’s well meaning question in the back of his mind. The real answer was a secret. A little bit, yes. Memories replayed in his mind. _The_ memory. Seiuus, tumbling back, the light of life already gone from his eyes, the limp emptiness filling his skin. The black shape. The man. The ship above.

He hadn’t frozen in fear. It wasn’t shock that said Garrus did nothing as his friend died. It was that cold, rational, tactical assessment he specialized in. If he lunged out, if he cried for vengeance just then, as that biotic and his cohort turned to see him, already alert, already full of murder, it would have been both of them lying dead on on that orange sand. Tactics said to wait, to find another way to avenge. To be as cold as death itself, like the good soldier he’d been raised as.

His heart had never liked it. Maybe even something hidden deep in his spirit, too. That part of Garrus asked him to question himself over and over, alone in the night until the doubt grew and gnawed at him. Before his superiors his answers were honest, and they knew and saw the truth. Tactics. _Tactics, Garrus_ , said his father’s voice. Sometimes he hated it, even when he knew that voice was right.

But the guilt haunted him. Not everything the living felt was rational. That, too, had been a real truth he’d tried to tell Seiuus’s nephew. He let go of his chin and puffed a tired sigh. He noticed a shadow pass by the doorway, looked over to see the Captain duck his head in to check on him. “Sir.”

Gabriel gave him one of those odd smiles he liked, a twisting of his lip in a way that looked both secret and affable. “Weekly zero-gee ping pong tourney’s about to start in 4.”

It was the way Gabriel said it that gave him a laugh. Since coming on board, the human captain revealed he had a fairly casual attitude about most things. It was just that business was _business_. He was sharp in a way Garrus thought he liked, and although turians were a different matter for him, he seemed to be genuinely warm to his crew. Garrus shook his head. “I lost my bet on last week’s game. Think I’ll pass this round.”

“Me, too. They play different when I’m in the hold. The difficulty of being a commanding officer. Everyone’s on their toes that little bit more when you pop up.” He still had that odd smile. “The necessity of being the one to always feel out of place.” He waved at the hall. “That’s two of us, and we both freely signed up for the job. Come on down to the lounge with me. Have a drink.”

Unusual, to Garrus. Superiors were supposed to be approachable, but friendliness between ranks was something to be careful about. “Something to talk about, sir?”

“Yeah, the ping-pong game. Maybe Alfred Hitchcock. I saw you were pulling retro files out of the library system.” The captain shoved an elbow against the door, looking at him. “I don’t know how turians are, so tell me if you think I’m stepping out of line. But you’ve been mostly either hard at work or in a book. Mostly. Haven’t taken a chance to warm up to the crew too much, and I expect I understand why. Now, that’s not a reprimand, I want you to understand. But I also think stepping away from the scene and refreshing the mind entirely is important.”

Garrus nodded. He frowned in thought, catching something in the captain’s awareness. “You aren’t a captain for command’s sake, are you? You started out a cop, like the rest of us.”

Gabriel snorted. “I’ve got a few centuries of hard-nosed Irish officer in the family, agent. Some of whom got their faces broken for doing the right thing when it counted. Always something to look up to in the family histories.” He looked down the hall, away from Garrus for a moment. “Come on down and we’ll talk about that, too, for the hell of it. At worst, you get some context for the stuff you’re reading.”

Garrus laughed and got up from his seat.

. . .

Human whisky was _good_ , Garrus had to admit. The beers were iffy, and some of the other spirits hit his sense of smell with a prickly annoyance that threatened to give him the sneezes, but whisky was his new friend. It opened him up to ask a handful of small, pointless, but nagging questions he had. “All right. Tennis scoring.”

“Let’s not,” said Gabriel. He picked up his empty glass and looked at the way light refracted through the decoratively cut panes a centimeter below its rim. Far from drunk, he was enjoying the lightest layer of buzz. “It makes no sense, I’m warning you up front.”

“That’s my problem. Love, then fifteen marks up to forty five, then set, then it’s by matches - where does _any_ that come from?”

“Clocks.”

“Clocks?” Garrus absolutely had a hard buzz, and it was _nice_. This was probably not the preferred post-grief Palaven medical doctrine, but he felt okayish for the first time in weeks. He looked at the digital display above the bar, unaware that time had gotten a little stretchy for him as it was. “I don’t get it.”

“We used to have clocks with visual clockhands, up from sundials. Quartering a round in fifteen-”

“But wouldn’t that be twenty-five, then? If it’s a quarter. Mathematically.”

Gabriel froze with his hand in midair, from where he had been trying to use the round lip of his glass to illustrate. “We count an hour by sixty minutes, so a quarter of sixty is fifteen. That’s where the clock to tennis thing comes from.”

Garrus stared blankly at him. “So midnight is love to humans?”

“No.” Gabriel leaned forward.

“Noon.”

“ _No_.” Gabriel closed his eyes, opening them again when Garrus refilled his glass with a slightly shaky hand. He looked at the drink, judging his responsibility and his own physical limits, and decided to wait on downing it. “Love in tennis scoring comes… from something else. Maybe eggs.”

Garrus reared back, staring at him in open disbelief. “Eggs?”

“It’s an old rumor. French word for egg, _l’ouef_.” He butchered the pronunciation and knew it. “Roundish like zero, so-“

“Eggs have a narrower end and a broader end, not like a zero at _all_.” This was painfully obvious to Garrus.

Gabriel opened his mouth, then lifted both his hands in defeat. “I told you it didn’t make sense.”

“Obviously! What is going _on_ with your planet?”

Gabriel saw an opportunity to save himself and the honor of his species and went for it, lifting his glass. “We drink a lot.”

Garrus stared at him and then the drink, dissolving into a real, flanging laugh. The laughing sobered him up a little, bringing the post-merriment touch of seriousness back into his mind. “You said your whole family’s been in the investigative business.”

“One way or another.” Gabriel looked across the surface of his drink, seeing the distorted reflection of the turian flicker across it as he put it back down. “My father’s still basically the county sheriff back home. Not like it used to be when we didn’t know what was all out there in the stars. A county sheriff now is still part of the world, part of the galaxy. Part of a standardized force. Better than it used to be, back when they used to crack the skulls of kids for being in the wrong town after dark. More than a few centuries where being a cop wasn’t honorable work, and we deserved the mistrust. Took a lot of hard work to get past that point.” He frowned. “But we’re never perfect.”

“Nothing ever is that.” Garrus leaned an elbow on the table. “I can’t really picture a world like that, where discipline ends up masking so much trouble under the surface, but…” He trailed off with a shrug. “Maybe I just don’t know enough about my own people’s mistakes.”

“Could be.” Gabriel inclined his head. “But let’s not hash over all the darkness. There’s countless books on it, written by better people than me. Point is, when the job works the way it should, there’s always people that need protecting, need someone else’s good eye to come see what went wrong. And I think that’s pretty standard in our galaxy. Almost every world we’ve met has something like it. The desire to see justice, where justice is due.”

“There’s always a place for people like us.”

“Exactly.” Gabriel leaned back in his seat, angling his arm so he could look around the currently private lounge. One crewmember was asleep in the corner. Not drunk. That was just Ellis. He preferred to sleep in strange places, including the mess, the lounge, a rotating schedule of the cargo holds, and, on one notable occasion, on a cot set up in a rarely used lav on the second deck. Gabriel would wander by once in a while to see if he was fine. Always was. Also one of the best organizational minds Gabriel’d ever met. Most of their data files went through him for sorting, came out looking like a computer did it. “And the bigger our galaxy gets, the more we’re needed and the more we have to learn to do it well.”

Garrus chuckled, dry and low and clacking. “Heard from my own father, that was one of the hardest things Alliance has had to deal with. All the cultural differences, all the ways we need to start learning about each other to make sure the job’s done well.” He looked across the bar, realizing he was almost entirely sober now, and he didn’t like it. “He was always a bit iffy on joining the Alliance. Not out of hate, exactly. Just that stoic, well, _concern_. About how things would change, and we’d never be able to keep up with it all.”

“Which, ironically, tells me how similar so many of us are.” Gabriel shook his head and gave in to the lure of the drink. “Sounds like mine. You’re reading our old books to get a sense of how we think about crime. _My_ father grew up obsessed with this damn old movie. I’ve seen it sixty times, and only twice by choice.”

“Which one?”

Gabriel waved it off, feeling embarrassed for bringing it up. “ _No Country for Old Men_. It’s depressing, feels like a relic from another planet. About, I don’t know, the relentlessness of death and change. I failed pop cultural theory and social relevance.”

Garrus hawked a surprised laugh.

“But my father studies this damn thing like if he watches it one more time, he’ll unlock the right way to change the whole story. The police work was done right in this thing, by the way. I got a different lesson from it. Sometimes it just won’t work out. Even if you did your part the best you could.”

“That’s the lesson we get from boot camp. Sometimes the operation can’t pull off a victory, no matter what.” Garrus shrugged. “We teach our young soldiers how to deal with the aftermath, not dwell on failure.”

“Even though sometimes you still do.”

Garrus’s hand clenched around the glass almost to the point of cracking it before he realized Captain Gabriel wasn’t looking at him, wasn’t trying to be razor-incisive. He was looking past the bar, into that unfocused elsewhere Garrus understood all too well. His hand relaxed, realizing the human understood, even if he didn’t mean to directly call out his own feelings. “Yeah,” he said instead, unable to keep from admitting that understanding. “Exactly.”

Gabriel sighed and his thoughts came back to the table, realizing what he’d run into. “You knew your partner a long time.”

“Boot partner. Pulled him along when a few other squads would have dismissed him. He was… unique, but he was damn good.” Garrus’s jaw gave a slow, thoughtful click. “He was the opposite of our fathers, Captain. He got it. Loved the variety of life in the galaxy, loved learning about it.” The next hurt to say. “Died for it.”

“I’d call that worthy, more than worthy. If we can make sure he carries on somehow. Turians got something like that?”

“He’s got a nephew, born spitfire. His gear will move on. We’ll remember his spirit.” Garrus quirked a sad smile, a particular bend of the mandibles. “And I’ll do my best by him. We were different, but… sometimes I think I should have learned more from him. Learned to understand his curiosity.”

“Until our last day, agent, we’ve still got time.”

Touched by that bit of human wisdom, Garrus lifted his drink to salute it.


	4. Chapter 4

4.

Nothing much happened for the next two weeks. The ping-pong tournament in the cargo hold began to lose its allure, players fading away to start card games, hobbies, and, popularly, a knitting circle in the observation deck. Purling the Stars. It was led by a low-ranking agent whose grandmother taught him the skill and who was stunned by the interest and his sudden command of a handful of high ranking officers. At the end of five days, several crewmembers were sporting handmade scarves of varying quality; long and chunky plain knits with messy purled ‘stars’ made out of a contrasting color. They began to travel around the ship as a kind of cheerful white elephant gift. If one appeared by morning, taped to the door of your personal quarters, you wore it for the day and then slunk around at night to secretly foist it off onto another member of the crew.

Gabriel, by virtue of his silence, permitted the gag to infect even the bridge crew. One day the comms chief was wearing one of the orphaned scarves. One day the various systems officers had all seven of them. There was almost an ecstatic riot the morning Gabriel himself stoically wore the ugliest to his captain’s chair.

Garrus understood his decision to play along, agreed with it. A harmless way to blow off the frustration of a slow hunt. He even realized the man was very likely enjoying it.

Meanwhile, nobody tagged Garrus, but not for a lack of trying. He was a curiosity on the ship, and an interesting one. They never made him feel left out, but he also knew he made for a fascinating target. He was amused by the game and turned it, as a turian teacher would among a lively boot camp, into a stalker’s tactical adventure. Rumor went out - successfully tag his room at night, and he would personally buy each member of the crew a drink. He was asked if that was true. He refused to confirm it, despite it being correct. Part of the game for him. Cadets watched his schedule, which he kept deliberately erratic. When did he return to his quarters? Would he emerge after light’s out?

Having access to certain top level logs, he discovered a few enterprising souls were researching turian biology and sleep habits. He played along for three night shifts, laying as the floor security system informed him, as requested, that he was being staked out. On the fourth, probably minutes before the latest scarf-bearer took her shot, he broke routine and emerged from his quarters with a theatrically giant yawn, wandering off to nose around the ship like a bored insomniac.

The game seemed to fade for a couple of nights, then re-emerging with a vengeance as _all_ the scarves hit the second in command’s quarters, her guard having been down too much to avoid it. Another week later, Garrus’s neck still went unadorned, a trophy all his own. But now he was being asked to the bar after shift by other investigators, to share drinks and talk about turian hunting techniques. He realized he was touched by this.

Sooner or later, he believed someone would get him, armed with the information he himself gleefully shared. He looked forward to it.

. . .

Four weeks. Garrus would doze sometimes, his head hovering over renewed tidbits of information. Flight logs. Inaccuracies in cargo weights. A bad ID card. Nothing of substance. He read, he played the hunting game with the humans, and then he would go out for company. A pleasant enough wait, although the tension in the air was creeping back.

He was almost fully asleep, his hand draped across a datapad set into his desk. Data scrolled across it, and he either dreamed the lines of data or read them, dumbly, in his semi-awake state. Either way, it meant nothing to him. The waiting. Sometimes Seiuus would come and read the words on the screen to him, peppering his narration with sardonic Seiuusisms that he couldn’t remember a second later. The sound of his voice in the dream made Garrus’s eyes damp.

Garrus jerked once, hearing a noise like it was inside his skull. A curiosity of many organic brains, that myoclonic twitch or that sensation like something exploding because the thoughts are drifting, drifting… then he jerked again. The sound was real. A chime, loud because it was blaring directly into the side of his skull. He pulled himself upright, smacking his jaw together until he was fully awake, and then answered the call. “Captain?”

“Ops brief, 0900. We’ve got a few new things. And I have an announcement.” Gabriel hesitated on the other side of the line. “You all right, agent?”

“Caught me napping, sir.” He let himself sound wry. “Don’t tell the crew I was doing that, I’d get every scarf on the ship.”

“Shouldn’t have told _me_. I’ve got two of the bastards I’m trying to offload.” Gabriel rang off without further ceremony. Garrus began to recompile his reference lists and timelines, refreshing what he knew of the facts about Krent’s recent activity. He took another look at the Systems Alliance dossiers on Krent and his known contacts, marking something that had been troubling him.

Or rather, a lack of something.

. . .

The team met around a long, oval table of black matte steel. Seven members of Gabriel’s handpicked team, Garrus, and the captain himself sat around. They shuffled data to each other via infopad, a digital stream of shared consciousness, checking and rechecking each other’s conclusions. Minutiae, attempts to condense facts, to cajole answers from silence. There were no real leads. The signals the captain summoned them to examine where little more than old trails. A contact from an informant in one station, a possibly related handful of theft reports at a distant outpost. There were some paperwork irregularities that cropped up over a registered Alliance vessel using the Shanxi-Theta mass relay, but that trail dried up the moment it touched Citadel space.

Garrus read the data for that closely, scrolling back and forth through the jumble of registered vessel codes and ship numbers. Something about it called to him, a feeling of wrongness in that investigative way that felt right, but he had nothing more than that and shelved it, meanwhile.

A live comm channel connected the _Cairo_ to Gabriel’s superior, Admiral Volansky. It pinged now and again to ensure the signal was still strong, the admiral listening in while doing whatever it was human admirals did in their offices. There were occasionally brief side chats between the admiral and the captain as the team went over the latest slush pile of data.

Ravikumar was a junior lieutenant on the case, a small, brown man with a bright quirk in his eye that made him seem naturally alert when he looped around at the fringes of the evening crew get-togethers. He lived up to his look, even now leaning over to examine the traffic data Garrus was absorbing, picking up on something in the turian face. “Something about that vessel specifically, right? How’d it get picked up on our records for a double-check? Looks clear. But it tripped something somewhere.”

“Mm.” Garrus put down the pad, hearing the man while not quite hearing him. The blackness of Krent’s ship would make for an easy palette for cover jobs, sure. Change the profile with a little effort. But the codes, though. Traffic patterns, engine signatures… his mind worked over the data, sifting through it, looking for the gleam.

“I think it’s a spoof, maybe just a guy not wanting to get looked at too close. But if it’s not Krent, it’s probably something else we should snap up.” Ravikumar tapped his pad to Garrus’s borrowing a snapshot of the data so he could whip up an investigation request.

Garrus was still elsewhere, lost in the trail, talking but not actually to the human. “Why would be bother using Alliance registries in the first place? If they’re that difficult to spoof, use somebody else. Krogan codes come cheap if you know the right thing to say. And we know he’s got volus contacts. It doesn’t make sense.”

“If he can pull it off, it looks that much more solid in the database.”

Garrus shook his head, realizing he was part of a conversation, and a useful one. “If it were that solid, I don’t think we even would have gotten this file. No it’s… it’s sloppy, somehow.”

Ravikumar grinned, like they were in on something together. “I feel like I’ve got a hunch, too. I definitely feel like if it’s not our guy, it’s tied together with it.” The grin faded as Garrus failed to stop the soft, derisive laugh that puffed out his nostrils. He tilted his head, puzzled. “What?”

Garrus looked away. “I don’t like hunches. They’re dangerous on their own.”

“It’s just intuition, man, your mind pulling together facts-“

“Before you _know_ all the facts! You jump into a bad situation without knowing everything about what you’ve got coming, what might be on your six, and then the next thing, kid, they’re-“ He cut himself off. Across the table, Gabriel shot him half a look, busy with another side conference with the admiral. He softened his voice, taking the conflict out of it. “Next thing you’re packing up someone’s gear. Or someone is packing up yours.”

Ravikumar shrugged off his tone. Most of the team, all human, of course, was like that. Capable of simply absorbing social conflict and coming out of it with no offense taken. Garrus found himself with a growing admiration for the attitude, if not yet the species. “That can happen even if everything is planned out to the nines. Sometimes it just goes wrong.”

“True,” said Garrus. A plain fact, and one he knew well. He picked up the pad again. “I just feel there’s something here we’re not seeing. A piece of data that’ll tie some things together.” He pressed a talon between his eyes, almost visualizing it. Then, something drifted by. A track. He put the pad down again. “Captain?”

Gabriel’s attention left his comm with the admiral, flickering towards him. “Agent.”

“Have we received _all_ the available information about Krent’s crew? Nothing held back?”

“We have everything that’s available, agent.”

Garrus scrolled through the infopad again, returning to the suspect dossiers. The picking sensation under his skin returned, like a claw scraping. “And as up to date as possible.”

“That’s correct.” Gabriel leaned back, studying him carefully. “You see something wrong, Garrus?”

He wasn’t looking at the captain. He was in the data. “Krent’s intermediary, the contact Seiuus and I drew out, he was a human. There’s no human listed in any of these logs. That’s a big position in Krent’s crew to miss. One of the spotters _should_ have seen him, at the very least coming out of the Citadel.” He looked up, through the captain, still watching an ephemeral trail. “If they’re running on Systems Alliance codes, then it would make sense for them to trot out the right species to look good for the security pass.”

Admiral Volkansky’s voice, surprisingly, rose from the captain’s comm. “That information isn’t verified, agent.”

“Sir?” Garrus jerked in his seat, surprised off his hunt by the direct address. “I _saw_ him.”

“We can verify that you saw a humanoid, yes. There was no evidence beyond that statement to ensure his species. Not for certain. It’s circumstantial.”

Was that _condescension_? Something flickered down Garrus’s back, hot and prickly. “He acted pretty damned human, Admiral.”

“We’re working on _facts_ here, agent, not your hunch.” The admiral’s voice took on an edge fit to match the shredded talons rippling under Garrus’s back. He tamped down his sudden anger as best as he could, sharing a glance with a stunned-looking Ravikumar. He cocked his head towards Garrus, wordlessly echoing his thought. Hunches. Fucking _hunches_.

Across the table, a senior lieutenant’s eyebrows arched damn near to her hairline, riding the undertow of the conversation and liking none of it. Lieutentant Maldives, with a dry sense of humor subtle enough to keep her out of taking shit for it.

Gabriel’s face remained a serene mask. If he was surprised by the Admiral’s chiding, he showed none of it. Nor did he twitch when the admiral spoke again. “You may inform them, Captain.” And then he dropped the connection.

Someone, Garrus couldn’t identify who, half whistled a long, drawn out _oooookay_. Maldives again, he would have bet. The room covered for her, not so much as twitching.

Gabriel inhaled and resettled his clasped hands on the desk, resuming control of the room. “Listen. The admiral’s been supervising this op from the start. Word is, he’s got a lot invested in this situation shutting down the right way, without anyone able to say we skipped a step. Agent Vakarian, you’re new on the block, so this might seem like a harsh turn from the man. And it _is_ harsh, I won’t disagree with anyone here about that. I know he’s been hard on all of us since we named Krent. We can’t miss our shot. He’s doing his best to make sure our aim is true.”

Unduly harsh, in Garrus’s opinion. Good superior officers back on Palaven weren’t just about leading the team to victory - they were about ensuring the team had the morale to lead _themselves_ to the finish line. He had been immediately unimpressed with Volansky on first brief, but like then, he now held his tongue.

“Now. The other reason I called for an ops meeting today is to notify you that Volansky gave me a surprise - a notification about an all-clear sent on what may turn out to be a useful engagement. We’ve had a hard time following the cold trail, but he thinks, and command agrees, Systems Alliance knows where some of Krent’s men are going to show up next. A chokepoint, basically. Alliance already has an observation team with elite backup ready in the lanes around Treyarmus, Hades Gamma. Now, that’s secure intel that doesn’t leave this room.” 

Gabriel flicked a hand towards the team. “If we’re lucky, they catch the black ship in the wild. We get Krent without any more fuss. And maybe, this all ends early. Everything we did the last few weeks? Maybe just prepping the paperwork for the tribunal. I realize that’s cold comfort for all the work you’ve been doing, team, but a real one, nonetheless.” He inclined his head towards Garrus with a smile. “Agent Garrus, might just turn out you got a nice space vacation away from home for a little while, get to watch this all clear up and go home for some more R&R before moving on.”

Garrus snorted. Nothing was ever that easy, much less justice. It _would_ be a nice switch, though. “Are we going along, sir? I’m prepared to assist any field team.”

“You’d be a solid asset if we go to combat, agent. Volansky tells me they should have it in hand. We have two frigates in place with a marine squad taking onboard point. We will be joining them on site, however, jumping in to local space to work support and help monitor the raid. If it pans out, we’ll be working clean-up, boarding post-incident to question the crew and help toss the place for evidence.”

Maldives turned professional. “When’s this going down, Captain?”

“0700 tomorrow. We’ll be moving into position tonight, so everyone better get their beauty rest.”

“So. That’s it.” Ravikumar gave Garrus that lightly stunned look again. “Maybe it’s over, easy as that.

Garrus’s mandibles flexed, still chewing everything over. His instincts disagreed - but not based merely on that human _hunch_. Never that. His facts were there, too. The image of the intermediary loomed in his mind, reaching out towards him with that distinctly human gesture of greeting. Something in his gizzard shifted, and he realized his hands were flexing in discomfort.


	5. Chapter 5

5.

The marine squad was formed of thirteen men and women. They waited, keyed up and ready, in the hold of the _SSV Vaslui_ , a frigate used to long patrols and quick responses. The second lead was a wiry lieutenant named Martin, whose face the _Cairo_ didn’t know but whose body language they already understood intimately. He was a fidgeter at heart, making the audio-video link he was charged with maintaining into a swimmy carsickness-inducing mess until he got the stabilizer feed package going. He swore occasionally as he wrangled the camera into submission, ripe and verdant language that would have horrified an elcor and impressed a krogan. Sometimes the feed jostled around as other marines elbowed by to get into their designation positions for when they’d start their boarding push. When the visuals finally stabilized, he was met with not entirely sarcastic applause by the observing team on the _Cairo_.

That part settled, Cairo hunkered down to take watch. The team followed along watching the live feed, making detailed notes on personal copies, all of them feeding into the interlinked infopads littering every console in the observation room. Even Maldives was smart enough to not remark on the more florid bits coming from the audio feed, but some particularly inspired invective caused soft snorts and one cautious, quietly approving cheer. Gabriel, to his credit, pretended to not notice.

The ship had taken a closer position than originally expected. At the last minute, the Captain authorized an order to move into neighboring orbit, improving the quality and lag of the stream by several useful seconds. The captain himself was tense, but good at hiding it. Garrus only knew because he watched, seeing the way the shoulders dug harder and further back into rigid position as go-time approached. Understandable. Garrus felt the same, one toe-claw curling reflexively and threatening to scrape steel.

The elements of surprise and well-trained pressure tactics employed by long-time marines ought to be more than enough to overrun almost any smuggler vessel. But these smugglers would be well armed, with uncertain numbers. _If_ that’s what the net caught.

A soft ping was heard somewhere in the frigate’s hold, a garbled conversation taking place just outside the feed’s optimal range. Captain Gabriel studied his own screen, apparently getting the same information. “We’ve got a ship approaching the vicinity.” Another ping, lower. “Arriving now in Treyarmus. _Vaslui_ , report.”

It took a moment, but the Vaslui command room signaled back, its communication officer checking in. “We’ve got an unmarked frigate. Right profile. We’re running its codes.”

A collective breath inhaled through two ships.

“Codes are clear but match the Shanxi-Theta irregularity. Its engines are offline, waiting for process. Waiting on command.”

_Cairo_ waited, too.

“Waiting on command.” The comms officer sounded nervous. Young and nervous. Garrus realized his hands were curled tight enough to dig into his own skin.

“Vaslui?”

Relief entered the comm. Nobody liked their time wasted, nobody wanted to sit on lookout for nothing. “We’ve got the green. We are preparing to go in.”

Silence filled the feed with hollow portent as the invisible gears of engagement locked. The feed showed marines shifting their weight from foot to foot, weapons raised in readiness position, fingers set safely alongside triggers. They moved into a triangular flock, predators ready to breach and sweep.

“We are locked in position.” Comm took a deep breath. “Countdown. Breach in 3… 2…”

A marine moved forward and stood by the hold door. Garrus didn’t see exactly what he was getting ready to do, but it didn’t matter. He knew. Boarding prep on a hostile vessel was a showy but controlled business. Marines made sure their enviro suits and helmets were in place. The hold door opened once the ship locked onto their breach point. The marine at point took her position, prepped her shape charge, and stepped away as she popped the door of the ship in the simplest way known to any world. Five seconds later, they were inside. A portion of the patrol broke off towards the rear, jamming the door shut and re-establishing a temp seal with the front team swept in to claim territory across empty space.

Cairo listened and watched, their tension renewed. The first seconds of an engagement were the deadliest, always.

“Front patrol, forward. Flank, left, watch for surprise.”

“Aye, sir.” They went through their paces, like textbook. “Clear, sir.”

“Split right. Check in, in five.”

Cairo’s team counted off five like a heartbeat, watching the feed through Martin’s eye, not seeing right patrol live. Martin stayed with the front. “Checking in. No movement. Clear in this hold.”

Someone in Vaslui’s command deck cut in, the transmission a little scratchy from the splice. “We’re reading multiple life signs across several decks. Ensure you are locked for soft-shot.”

Garrus grunted under his breath at that. Alliance wanted a live capture out of this. He wasn’t sure he agreed, but nobody asked him and he supposed he probably wasn’t the right guy to ask. Besides, there was still the distant chance this was some other unmarked vessel under the paint, riding with bad codes.

One of the unseen marines behind Martin let out a disgruntled bark of his own at that, a human Garrus might’ve bought a beer for in other circumstances. “Horse’s ass. We’ve got them cold, and how many of our guys have these fuckers dropped?”

“Secure that, marine. We’re proceeding clean.”

“Yessir,” said the unseen figure, doubtful but compliant.

Patrol lead spoke up. “Roger that. All points, move forward. We’re going to target Command deck, then sweep each until clear.”

Shakier footage resumed as the squad jogged down corridors and halls turned into additional cargo, filled with crates that gave Garrus that crawling sensation. This was the right ship, hunch or no hunch. Martin was called over to get footage of a section the squad locked down on the way, a dedicated hold lined with enormous crates. Martin, not there for editorial reasons, nonetheless dropped a low, long whistle and began to narrate. “You reading this, _Cairo_? Armax for sure, no fucking kidding. Kassa armor, hope that’s not being worn by these guys right now.” He rustled as he shifted to get a better view. “Are you fucking with me right now? I think that’s geth. They’ve got geth shit piled in the corner. Who _is_ this asshole?”

“A guy who really likes his toys,” said Ravikumar behind Garrus.

Garrus gave a half turn to look at him, nodding once in approval. “And who likes money about as much.”

That single hold told him plenty. This _was_ Krent’s ship - and Krent was far richer than they’d guessed. More than enough motive to keep his job, to be jumpy when faced with a lone turian, to want to push back if he felt threatened. Kill first, count the money later.

There was no guard presence when they’d locked the hold. Not a soul in sight. Garrus realized he was worried. _Very_ worried. That didn’t fit. “Sir, I suggest they have the option of lethal or harder shot. I think they’re…” He trailed for a moment. _Not surprised_ is what he wanted to say, but he held that back in favor of advice. “Possibly preparing a counter.”

There was no response. The suggestion went ignored. Gabriel had been pulled into a side conversation again. Probably Volansky. Garrus took a glance at his face, saw the tension flare anew. Definitely Volansky.

So far the operation was now in play for five minutes. As no boarding notification had been given, and the shape charge and entry done silent, _technically_ surprise should still be on the marine’s side. Garrus’s jaw flexed. He doubted that. He doubted that completely, but he was on the sideline.

“We’re moving onward and upward. Gang, watch your six. Make sure we’re on the upper hand.”

They swept. Still nothing in the next two areas. More crates, more boxes, more awful implication. Garrus looked away at the crated suits of high end turian armor, matched with weapons. Like matched sets. Give the one you love the gift of murder today.

“We’re coming up on the command deck. This place is one hell of a mess.”

“Watch your surroundings, _Vaslui_.” Gabriel had torn himself away, his fingers now tapping anxiously at his console. Garrus thought he felt a glance come his way but kept his own eyes on the screen. A moment later, Volansky cut out of the line with a soft ping, probably to confer with other command leads.

Garrus would swear he felt the change before it hit. The sensation in the air. An impossibility, he was only watching. And yet, when the first profane shout came from one of the marines, all he did was lift his chin like he’d been ready for it.

“Cover, now!”

Light scorched the air, whiting out the video feed as the ship’s crew attacked. As it faded, the silhouettes of several men poured out from behind crates and around the deck doors. The sounds of shouting and screaming, the common, awful music of every battle. Martin was now hanging back with the rear defense, his job to document, and now, in the worst case, to provide covering fire.

The men - Krent’s men, Garrus decided. His doubts were gone - entrenched themselves up and down the hall, a few scrambling atop high-stacked crates for opportunistic fire at the risk of exposure. Garrus winced at the familiar sound of a high-impact turian assault rifle. One of the marines fell with a wet sound. Then another one. Someone screamed orders, a mix of translated English, and unusually coarse salarian.

Krent. Garrus’s mandibles scraped against themselves.

Martin ducked, juking around behind a steel crate and spraying artfully messy cover fire as another marine readied his push. A small, pale face appeared and then disappeared on the enemy side, quick as it came, assessing the attack and gesturing to his companion to return fire. The marine’s assault failed, fatally. Half the squad attempted to fall back to a more defensible position, not acknowledging aloud how rough the fight was from the start. A few of Krent’s men fell, but not as many. Not as quickly.

A second later, the telltale aura of a biotic throw illuminated the sight of a marine launched against the far wall, Martin silently catching the arc of his last flight. Garrus’s heart couldn’t stop a lurch of empathy, hurting anew at the sight of the lead marine’s head drooping from his neck at an unnatural angle.

This left Martin in charge. The camera became a secondary conceit, a haphazard observer as the man did his best. Martin, as if eerily aware of everything he’d recorded, barked for a strategic retreat. They were down to four. Four living marines, taking heavy fire. Two minutes from first contact. There were low moans in Cairo’s observation room.

Garrus didn’t realize he was halfway into a snarl as Krent himself appeared in full. A black biotic’s battlesuit hung on his lank figure, with a high-impact Armax pistol at the ready in his non-dominant hand. Behind him, that pale face from before darted into sight again. Something flew from his direction. Garrus identified it as a small pulse grenade, shouted a warning at the feed that went unheard. A box next to Martin exploded into splinters, the feed filling with the telltale feedback whine.

“This was an ambush,” said Garrus, his voice cold. “They were ready, Captain.”

Gabriel looked at him. His expression was unreadable, but his face seemed drained of blood.

“Sir, we need to jump in. They were ready for the marines. They wouldn’t be ready for _us_. A second team.” The vid crackled back into life. Martin was still alive. Maybe two others.

Maldives jumped in, backing him. “We’ve got time before the ship warms up.”

“No, lieutenant. We don’t. They’re going to jump within seconds, they never fully cut engines as they jumped in.” Garrus wanted to protest. Gabriel turned to them with his hand up, but something in his face said he wasn’t done. “We can can catch up to them at Attican, it’s the next major nexus. Strong odds he goes there. And then you’re right. He won’t be expecting a followup attack.” The sound of the feed distracted the captain from anything else he might have said. He, with the team, turned to see what caused the unearthly metal shriek. The video shifted to a ground-level view of debris and clean, black-booted feet. Garrus’s stomach sank. Martin was very likely dead.

That slim, pale figure darted by the camera, and a close, whining shot ensure Garrus was correct. The next sound was a clanging smash, and with that, the feed ended.

Garrus’s talons clacked on the console, gripping it, waiting for the word. Any word. It came from _Vaslui_ communications. “Enemy frigate has blown our lock. They’re loose.” A moment later, the worse follow-up. “ _Vaslui_ is taking fire. We are taking heavy fire, and we are falling back.”

Gabriel turned to one of his lieutenants and barked orders to be carried to helm. It wasn’t more than scant seconds before _Cairo_ woke up and began to move. It was Garrus’s turn to be addressed next. “You ready for combat, Agent Vakarian?”

“Always, sir.” His cold voice. The one that said boot camp was done. That he’d been here before - and he wasn’t going to go back alone this time.

“Get your kit. I’m putting you in lead.” Gabriel’s gaze swept the room. He saw no disagreement, no defiance. Then he beckoned Garrus towards him. “I’m not ordering soft-shot, agent. Thirteen marines. Your partner. Civilians at risk from unsecured arms. You hearing me?”

“Loud and clear, Captain.”

Gabriel watched his face. There may have been something else there. Then he nodded, looking pleased. “Loud and goddamn clear.”


	6. Chapter 6

6.

Garrus doublechecked the suit’s operations. Optic enhancements were online, shields were at full power, and an assault rifle rested with hungry ease in his hands. There was a tickling sense of deja vu under his anger, the dread that came from seeing others go before him. That where he was about to go, others had already tried and died. The only question would be if their bodies had been jettisoned into space, lost to Alliance and to their families, or if they would still be laying dead in the hold for him to step over. His stomach was cold and full of uneasy acid.

The humans crowded around him, and he found he didn’t mind. Ravikumar was a small but fast figure in a tactical suit, and Maldives took the point spot, ready to blow a hatch, the deja vu lining her face and adding a look of strain under the harrowing light. She was mumbling to herself, a latin prayer Garrus read in one of their books, a forgiveness for trespass and for a gentle spirit to watch over them and their dead. He respected it, he supposed, though he’d rarely made time in his life for that sort of introspection. His approach to the idea of any active turian faith was even more spartan than most. The spirits might guide, but everything else rested in your own hands.

He looked down at his. Perhaps a salarian neck might rest there soon, as well. That would almost be worth a hungry prayer. He uttered a low sound at the thought, a threatening, flanging hum of potential satisfaction. Krent. He was going to have a chance at Krent, within his own grasp. Krent. Now with more blood on him, more people Garrus couldn’t save, didn’t have a chance to so much as try.

_Soon_. The word was sibilant in his mind, his tactical side trying to right his physical vessel, and right now he hated it. He knew patience. He knew waiting. This was long past time for that.

Lieutenant Maldives turned her head to glance at him and he read the tight look on her face, that recognizable pinch of battle tension. Ravikumar swallowed and asked the question Garrus already read on her face. “Have you led this kind of operation before, sir?”

Garrus tilted his head down towards the man, automatically gentling like he would for younger cadets. “I’ve been leading hot squads since early boot. A lot of sims, too, but…” He trailed off with a shrug.

“I’ve heard turian sims are no-shitters compared to ours. Don’t you get hurt at yours?”

“If you’re stupid and unprepared, you can get hurt doing anything.” He couldn’t resist a soft snort. Training had been not only simple but enjoyable, begun at an early age at his father’s knee. It remained fun when it was a formal fact of his life. His memory reminded him. Seiuus had been why. Irreverence. Out of the box thinking. Fun for the sake of fun. Something clicked in his throat as his finger curled tight around the rifle’s safety. He shook it off. “It’s the job. You adapt to it. If you can’t or won’t, you’re in the wrong place. It’s how we live.” He gave the human a wry look. “Are _you_ prepared, Agent Ravikumar?”

“I better be.” Ravikumar looked up at Garrus, saw something there. “By the look of you, sir, I think it’d be a bad day to be an unprepared salarian.” He half-lidded his eyes, about to completely endear himself to Garrus. “I hope he has the worst day of his life.”

Garrus resisted the urge to clap him on the shoulder. “Stay low and behind. They’re going to be scattered. This time, we really will take them all by surprise. They’ll be in small packs at first. Clean-up. It’ll take them time to regroup.”

Maldives added her own sour mutter. “God, this time. What the _hell_ happened last time?”

Suspicions flickered through Garrus’s thoughts, with no time for them to root and flower. Not yet. Not when he was about to take responsibility for a dozen young humans and an unknown quantity of bastards ahead. “I don’t know,” he allowed. Then, the quiet hunter’s thought. _But we are going to find out_.

A moment later, Cairo’s hatch clanked into position with a metallic scree. Klaxons bleated irritably as Garrus and his team silently poured into the hostile vessel. Cairo had overtaken their target smoothly while the team talked, no warning given, no notification sent to Alliance command. A risk on Captain Gabriel’s part, both tactical and political. The old human phrase came to Garrus’s mind - better to get forgiveness than ask permission.

Garrus wondered if this mission had gone personal for someone other than himself.

The smell of fresh human blood, scorched air, and hot metal hit his senses with the impact of a brick. The last few survivors of the failed assault had tried to fall back to the hatch, believing a full retreat would save them. By then, however, Vaslui had been forced to pull away. Their fates were sealed.

Garrus couldn’t stop the enraged, flanging noise from rattling out his throat, an animal’s deadly hunting purr. His neck was tight and the flesh under his mandibles felt hot as forged iron. He barked out terse orders, broke the team into three parts, and they surged forward to bring the fight home to Lorben Krent.

. . .

Krent howled invectives in multiple languages, an intricate architecture of anger meant to fence in the news of the latest invasion of Alliance rubbish. He slapped a thin hand against a smashed-open crate, the guts of it gone freshly empty. New weapons were already being handed out, ammo drops refilled to try and slow down the steady advance. It came to little. Each update was worse than the last. This new assault was implacable. Krent suspected he knew why. Turians. _Those_ fucks. All gun, no pity.

And worse, little James thought he saw an opportunity to whine about being right. Humans. He hated the fleshy things. “Krent, I _told_ you that fucking turian was going to be a problem.” The man gestured towards the corridor beyond their currently secure lair. “He’s tearing apart the entire place. We’ve lost the lower and first decks, we’ve got five men down. We weren’t prepared for a second strike!”

“No,” said Krent with all the coldness he could muster. “We weren’t. And who do I have to blame for _that_?” As he stressed the last, he whipped around and caught the weak human neck in his hand. He wanted to finish it. Snap the vertebrae to pieces. A little biotic push to collapse the internal structure.

James stared defiantly back, smart enough to always be afraid of him, but firm. “They weren’t given an order for this, Krent. I would have been warned. They made this push on their own.”

“You call me _sir_ , you worthless dredge of evolutionary slime.”

“I’ll call both of us dead if we don’t get out of this. _Sir_.” James spat the word, feeling the hand around his throat, feeling it loosen despite every neuron in Krent’s skull telling him to do it. The human was valuable. Krent considered, perhaps too late, that he’d allowed the human to become _too_ valuable. That had been a risk. But Krent accepted his own greed, and James had matched that greed worthily.

Krent came to a different conclusion, leaning forward to squint liquid threat into James’s face. Time for the little drummer boy to play real soldier. “Get your suit, James. You’re going out on the line.”

“I’m not fighting Alliance!” The piggish blue eyes widened.

“As you say, we’re dead if we don’t get out of this. All in, James. We fight.” Krent tilted his head as he controlled his biotic aura, letting it rise, letting it strike the human’s skin with that threatening chill. “Or we die. Perhaps I don’t really care which.” He let a smile play across his face as he let go of the human’s throat, enjoying the hostile stare he got in return. “But James. Leave the turian to me, if it’ll make you feel better. Besides. I’m sure he will insist upon it.”

. . .

The second squad reported in with a minor victory. They’d taken down two more of Krent’s men behind an ad hoc fortress of secured canisters and empty crates. Garrus could feel the ship shudder under his feet, ricochet fire through the halls. The smell of fusing metal and scorched wood made it hard to breath. The smoke was rising, but aside from tweaking their HUDs to compensate for the vision impairment, they ignored it. This wasn’t about revenge. It was _all_ about revenge. Two thoughts chained in paradox.

The Cairo team had taken two casualties so far. One was injured but mobile enough to retreat to safety under his own power. The other man lay dead, wounds cauterized on impact. The first and second squad teamed back up long enough to clear out the area around the dead man. Maldives stopped long enough to close the soldier’s eyes with two gentle fingers, and then she identified and ended her compatriot’s murderer with a coldly delivered double-tap to the forehead of the enemy salarian. Then the two squads resumed its hunt down the side corridors, looking to mop up, looking for where to start the next push.

Meanwhile, Garrus marched relentlessly towards Command, the rest of his first squad in tow. He himself dropped two enemy smugglers so far, each one killed without so much as a second look to be sure their corpses weren’t the human and the salarian he sought. These two were worthless to him in death and in life.

The opposition had been sharply weakened numerically. Understanding this, feeling trapped, they ramped up their ferocity. Garrus’s squad was blocked in at one junction for several tense minutes while a group of Krent’s loyalists passed behind the defenders, trying for a pincher. It might have even worked, insults flung aside flashbangs and weapons fire. Finally Garrus unleashed his temper, a cold turian rage, and attempted a dangerous melee rush. Energy shots spanged off his deployed shield while Ravikumar scrabbled to catch up and give him the cover he needed to succeed.

His optical display flashed a warning at him. 2% shield integrity, one shot, maybe two, until Garrus would take the next one to the brain. A smuggler gurgled after his attack, and he focused on that instead. The followup shots from his team did the rest. The danger didn’t slow him, he continued down the corridor with the defensive line broken. Ravikumar and the rest caught their breath as he fled on. Towards Krent.

. . .

It was stupid of Garrus to march on alone. That coldly rational part of his mind, with its voice far too much like his father, screeched its warnings at him. Fury pushed him onwards. Both parts of his mind wouldn’t shut up, wouldn’t stop screaming, wouldn’t stop flashing images at him. The faces of the dead. Martin, the ill-fated Marine, became Seiuus. Dead Vaslui soldiers whose names he couldn’t remember but whose faces were etched, each of them became Seiuus. The slack face under Maldive’s fingers, it was Seiuus. It was irrational. It was a distraction. All of it boiled up, casting his vision in the killer’s mindless red.

Perhaps the human traditions had the right of it. Perhaps it was a mistake to permit a man with personal and tragic involvement to continue a dangerous case. Perhaps he was in too deep. Garrus didn’t care. His squad wouldn’t be far behind. He didn’t care. Lorben Krent waited ahead. About that, Garrus cared.

He nearly lost his fight the moment he engaged with it. A heavy plastisteel canister, glowing with that sharp, unnatural biotic gleam, glanced against his shoulder even as he managed a last-second dodge. Pain thudded through him. He didn’t care. He recovered from a stumble and threw himself into cover before Krent could ready another biotic toss. Or something worse.

Shots followed up the psychic assault. Unlike Garrus, Krent wasn’t alone.

Garrus didn’t hate biotics as a rule, but this one was high on his shit list. His breath hissed in surprise and rage, mostly at himself for being caught unguarded by someone that he knew damn well could snap his neck in seconds without laying a hand on him. He cursed at his own temper, staying crouched for cover. By the shots, it meant two more hostiles guarding Krent. That was bad odds. He could remain where he was and wait for backup…

The tactical realization hit him with that cold certainty. The humans would be left open, as he had been. He swore again and committed himself to a far more rash but hopefully effective stunt.

Garrus slunk around to the left-hand side of the crates hiding him, knowing there was no way to keep his movements silent. He paused, scraped his armor against the crate, and let his rifle whine slightly as it charged. But instead of readying his shot, he froze, listening with every part of his body, waiting for that unconscious and ready inhale of his opponent. Once he heard it, he flung himself back towards the other side of his shelter and ducked around, buying himself a clear second as the hostile still assumed his former location.

He crashed bodily into one of the hostiles, a shot at close range leaving him with the burnt smell of ozone. 1% flared his optic warning, and he flung his salarian attacker into another hostile, a smallish krogan.

A familiar smirk dipped back behind a different set of crates. Krent. A biotic toss neatly missed Garrus, causing a topple near the door. He didn’t bother paying attention to that. The small krogan took a followup shot that cut through that last percentage and lased high on Garrus’s arm. He hissed in pain, mid-charge towards his shooter, but didn’t stop. The krogan fell back hard under the weight of one pissed-off alien cop, taking a rifle butt sharp to the face, and then Garrus delivered a final charged shot while the krogan was still stunned.

The corpse twitched slightly as it fell against the wall.

A rapid kill against bad odds. Garrus didn’t savor it, falling back into his prior cover. He grabbed at the wound on his arm, feeling it ooze as he winced. It was nothing that couldn’t be repaired, but it was fair to say it still hurt like a bitch. Like everything else, Garrus compartmentalized it deep at the back of his mind and listened, feeling a soft vibration under his feet that suggested another skirmish nearby.

Coarse screaming came from the far side of the room, vicious enough to suggest it was poor Krent laying wounded. Uncouth piece of shit, Krent. Garrus let his jaw flex, using the screaming to mark Krent’s position. _Keep screaming, you bastard. I’ll be along shortly_.

. . .

Lorben Krent wasn’t howling for the reasons Garrus assumed. The room rumbled again, heavier this time. Not another firefight. It didn’t matter to Krent if his opponent guessed the real reason, but he knew exactly what was going on.

It meant Krent’s trust had finally been betrayed. The human brat launched several of their emergency shuttles all at once. One for him, the rest to confuse followers, give him a chance to not be shot out of space. James abandoned his ship, abandoned his duty. Abandoned Krent. He banged his fist against the floor and resisted the urge to add lyrical asari vulgarity to his screams. The fucker had his finance codes. If James wanted, he could get money out of countless shell accounts. The accountants would give up everything. Why not? He had Krent’s personal authority.

Well. When he’d finished with this turian grunt, Krent would simply transmit an order to change all financial permissions. Then he’d hunt the boy down himself. The thought was a comforting one.

But first.

Taunting was always useful to Krent. It created openings. “You’re that fresh-faced little one, aren’t you? I read all about you. Know. Thine. Enemy. Daddy’s favorite child, and him bending knee at the Citadel, yes? You’ve a terribly honorable family. An old one. I should admire that. I killed your friend. He died well enough for your kind. No mewling. No begging. I _like_ that about you turians. Just that wet little gurgle. All of your kind gurgle. Well… to be fair, I suppose we all do, really, at the end.” Krent laughed once, sharp and biting. “Not so much the hanar, of course. Difficult for them, just as fascinating in their way. But I’m sure you take my point.”

Nothing from the turian but a soft, soft breath.

“Of course you’ll gurgle, too. It’s a sweet sound, has a melody to it that’s never replicated in the lab. It adds a poignancy to death that’s worth treasuring. I actually don’t like killing all that much, would you believe? It cuts into profits. But there’s no point in ignoring the scientific and spiritual beauty of it. But speaking of profits… I don’t suppose we could make a deal, turian?”

Silence was his answer. Krent couldn’t even catch the hint of a breath now. Had the man slunk out? Or snuck closer. Krent kept his back to the corner of his safe little space, prepping a silent-mode pistol. His eyes were usefully huge and dark, and he watched all the shadows. An idea occurred to him, a good one. A playful one. “Well, I didn’t think so. It’s so hard to buy your kind off, I have to get my business through other ways. So that said, I _could_ sell you a… _most_ interesting prize.” Was that a shadow flickering along the wall? He lifted his chin to watch it, training his pistol in that direction. His psychic will flickering along the backs of his hands, alert, alive. “Would you like a traitor? I’ve one for sale. New stock, just arrived today. In a manner of truthfully speaking.”

The whisper came, soft, flanging, the turian way of sibilant hostility. “ _I want nothing from you._ ” Oh, that was close. A delicious lick of death.

Krent tensed, his last credit on the table. “Not even my life?”

. . .

Garrus tensed all of his muscles, and then shoved. Boxes scattered and Krent opened fire at their shadows. Several shots cut close enough for him to smell ozone. He ducked again, scuttled into position, and fell onto his prey with gravity as his backup.

Krent reacted with a close-quarters toss. Biotic energy rippled and then crackled down his arms, but Garrus had him in an unbreakable clench. Krent was dragged along by his own attack, tumbling together and the pistol torn from his hand by the combined force of their landing. He gasped for air, surprised at his own power used against him.

Garrus took his opportunity and swung onto the top of Krent. He punched the smuggler once, and then again, and then more, heavy and satisfying blows, too primal for his training. One side of Krent’s face and the skin along his jaw was torn up and pulped before Garrus recovered the pistol and aimed into one staring eye.

“You know, you should take the shot,” said Krent, low and almost lizardlike. He choked on a mouthful of his own blood, spat it to the side. “Not that I’m ready to die, but I admit, there’s less paperwork all around.”

Garrus’s hand shook, his finger tight next to the trigger. _I could. Yes, I could. No one would mind. One more dead criminal_. A justified shot. He’d been sanctioned to do it by Captain Gabriel, even. But would that be enough for him, for his memories of the dead? He leaned down to fix his gaze full on Krent’s face, that cold place in his belly turning into sharp ice. His sunken, almost avian eyes stared into the salarian’s huge dark ones. His jaw worked as he thought. He could almost see it. That thin face, torn apart by close fire. Dark blood cooked to sludge. The limpid eyes shattered. It was almost reality. It could almost have been enough.

Almost.

“No,” he said, letting the coldness overrule him, tamp his fury. That primal hunter had fed enough. Justice was an icier thing. He wanted more, and he could wait for it. “No. I’m taking you in, Krent. This way, you suffer. Probably for a very long time. I’m going to see to it, every step of the way. Make sure it’s as bad for you as possible. Death is too easy. I want you to live.”

Krent laughed, the bitted sound of it wet against his beaten jaw.

Garrus listened to it, the grimace flickering along his face. One more treat. Calculated. He smacked the pistol sharp between the eyes, thudding the skill against the metal deck. He took satisfaction in the way the face went slack, unconsciousness glazing and shutting those eyes.

He sagged, relieved, the last of the adrenaline leaving him empty. His breath came ragged. He was still sitting atop Krent, the warrior in repose, when the rest of the squad finally caught up to him.


	7. Chapter 7

7.

It was Ravikumar that broke the silence that fell, heavy and companionable, on the squad after the op. A little over half a dozen humans and one turian were dropping bloodied combat gear onto the racks, where they’d get aftercare after the survivors got their care. “Good thing the captain made the call to jump, huh? We got ‘em. Hot dropped onto their asses and we got ‘em.”

“Volansky’s probably going to be pissed,” said Maldives, the thud of her body armor onto the rack adding emphasis. She stared at her bloody hands, wiping her fingers across the shoulder of her kit with obvious futility.

Garrus said nothing to any of that, but he flicked a glance at both at turn, his mind still gnawing away at things that were said, things he’d seen. A holoreel of both ops played in his mind as he mechanically locked away his gear. _Traitor_ , whispered that hunter’s greedy voice. Logic suggested it was possible there were actually two. Krent’s bargaining chip, and whoever sold out the _Vaslui_ to Krent’s ambush. It was possible for them to be the same person, but not likely. That same cold logic suggested another kind of smuggler’s tunnel. Krent’s traitor had a person on the outside.

He grunted to himself as he racked his assault rifle, making the decision, formulating the tough question he was going to have to ask. There was little choice, now that the fury was gone and their target was caught. It was back to cold, hard justice. Deaths had to be avenged, strings had to be tied off. One half-pulped salarian wasn’t enough payment for that. Krent gave him a clue whether he’d wanted to or not. Time to follow it.

. . .

“Agent.” Captain Gabriel smiled warmly at Garrus as he entered, waving him towards the seat on the other side of his desk. The smile of a job well done, the smile of genuine respect. It panged a bit at Garrus, but not as hard as the wince he kept off his face as his bony ass landed on the hard chair. _That’s it,_ he thought. _If I ever get assigned to a human ship as regular duty, I’m bringing my own spirit-blessed damn furniture_. Gabriel noticed none of this, or was too tactful to bring it up. “You and the team did a magnificent job out there. We’ve got Krent off our spaceways, and the ones that ran, well, we’ll catch up to them soon enough.”

“Are we going to be following up on that personally?” Garrus made sure his flanging was low and mild, losing the sharp undertone that his probing investigator’s voice often had.

Gabriel, no dummy, still shot him a look. He considered before giving his response. “No, not us. Command wants us to start moving back towards Widow, head for the wrap up.” Command. Volansky again. Garrus mechanically filed that away. “We’ll be plotting the jump before end of shift, and we’ll be back in time for the end of happy hour at all the best bars on the Citadel. Once we square away our final reports, we get you back home. According to routine, we’re done, agent. I’m happy with our joint effort and look forward to the chance of it happening again, even if we only get to come together for darker work.”

It was a real compliment, well earned. Garrus flexed his jaw, a sincere attempt to give Gabriel a turian smile, but it wouldn’t reach his eyes. Gabriel’s warm look didn’t falter, but that glance, that equally sharp detective’s eye, caught something and his clasped hands flexed against each other. “Captain, I’d like to ask a little favor. As one investigative agent to another.”

“I can’t make promises, but I’m more than willing to do what I can. Go ahead.”

“I’m extremely troubled by what happened to the _Vaslui_.”

Gabriel nodded, unfolding his hands and turning them into a thoughtful steeple. “I recall you tried to suggest it might have been an ambush scenario during the feed. I should have listened more closely.” Garrus thought he heard something there, but wasn’t sure. Not regret. A kind of thoughtfulness? “There’s already a post-op Alliance team looking into the possibility. Their prelim suggests it may have been nothing more than bad luck. Our first personal look at Krent himself suggests he’s a jumpy kinda guy.”

“Krent implied he had a traitor on his ship, and I _know_ there was another human on board. The one we didn’t get.” Garrus leaned forward, didn’t press his point, didn’t remind Gabriel how he’d been smacked down on this topic before. “Now, I’m not going to take a killer’s word at face value, but he was also under duress and trying to run a last chances game for his own skin. The coin from that kind of desperation is usually layered with at least a trace of the truth. That may not mean much on our end, but if he does have a traitor to sell, experience and logic tells me there’s actually two. One to inform to Krent, who then left him in the lurch when we made our move, and the one who passed Krent’s man his information.”

Something quirked at the corner of Gabriel’s mouth. Garrus couldn’t read humans perfectly yet, didn’t know how to read it. “I appreciate your attempt to be politic about this, Garrus, but it sounds to me like you’re pretty damn convinced we’ve got a wolf in the fold.”

“Call me a pessimist, Captain. Scratch me, you’ll find a regularly disappointed idealist. But I want to be wrong, sir, and it’s my job to make every effort to prove myself wrong on the way to seeing what’s right.”

Gabriel leaned back and the mysterious look turned into a plainer, wry smile. He tapped a finger on the desk. “You want ship logs. Ours and _Vaslui_.”

“Full access, if I could. I might spot what a data-team won’t. Or hasn’t been allowed to see.”

Captain Gabriel coughed a small laugh, but not a mocking one. “Officer logs, top level comms. Garrus, at this point, you’re either serious as a heart attack or gone out of your mind.”

“Could be both, sir.” He allowed the joke to ease the tension in the air.

Gabriel settled down, turning serious. “Me, I doubt the latter. I have no doubts about your commitment, Garrus, and I’m as clean as they come. Family history, you know how it is.”

Garrus nodded, understanding.

“You can check mine right here and now, with my supervision. I won’t interfere with your study, however. The rest I’ll release to your room’s console. Is that good enough?”

“More than, sir.” Garrus dipped his head, meaning it.

. . .

Gabriel’s officer logs were just as he said. No irregularities. Some private correspondence to his wife living on Citadel which Garrus tactfully skipped over after seeing no unusual keywords. _Call it a hunch_ , said the asshole part of his mind. Regular ops reports to Command, several dozen direct communications with Admiral Volansky. There was nothing unusual there, either, beyond the heavily hands-on supervision.

Garrus idled the most over those, something still gnawing inside of him, making his gizzard feel cold and tight. _There’s something around here. I’m just not seeing it_. It wasn’t the captain. Instinct, knowledge, and faith all said so. That dreaded hunch whispered the name Volansky over and over, and he reminded himself that just because he didn’t like the admiral didn’t make him a guilty figure. To the facts, there was nothing to latch onto. Just nothing.

His talons clicked thoughtfully on the console as he scanned up and down the logfile one more time. Gabriel leaned against the wall, watching him patiently, letting him think. He shifted as Garrus paused on the last file, feeling the same echo of discomfort. The uploaded copy of _Vaslui’s_ ill-fated attack, the one that would be stored in every Alliance archive. Martin’s dead voice, narrating forever. Garrus watched part of it, feeling the same sickness as he’d had when the marines were first gunned down, then stopped the footage. He glanced at the tab, automatically absorbing the raw facts. Seven minutes and forty-two seconds that ended in carnage. The vid was stopped on a blood-streaked boot filling the frame.

Garrus shook his head and shut the file. “Thank you, sir. You were right. There’s nothing here.”

“It’s just a shitty situation all around, Garrus.” Gabriel leaned forward to offer his hand to the turian. Garrus inspected it, feeling the shadow of Seiuus draw close again. He took it, gingerly, and found himself in a firm handshake that had none of his own worries in it. “Take your time with the rest of the logs, then get some real downtime. Promise me that, agent. You’ve been running on all engines for too long.”

Garrus chuckled. “Getting twitchy.” His mandibles flexed, under the skin the itching sense that he was still missing something. The facts said he hadn’t. The itch remained. “Acknowledged, sir.”

“Dismissed, agent.” Gabriel snapped an easy salute. “Feel free to meet me in the lounge for a drink, later. Everyone needs to decompress.”

. . .

Garrus’s room remained in pre-combat disarray, showing the signs of that hurried scramble to pull together personal gear, double-check his tactics, a chair jostled to the side from jotting down notes before and after the operation. His cot was a mess all its own, clothing left in a pile as he prepped the layers he needed for wearing a battlesuit. There was an infopad atop the pile, the one he’d used during the _Vaslui_ observation. It hung in suspension, not recently cycled with the rest of the ship’s network. The screen remained stuck on the end of the ambush, like another ghost that refused to stop dogging him. Garrus looked down at it, this copy automatically paused on the last second, the last moments of Martin, then gently pushed it aside as he started neatening up his mess.

Then he froze, a turian-cut tunic dangling like shed skin from his hand. “Seven minutes, forty- _six_ seconds,” Garrus said aloud, in a shocked blurt. He dropped the tunic, his head craning into that thoughtful predator’s kink, thinking, thinking. _Wait…_

He held himself like that for most of a minute, processing at hyperspeed, and then he swore, a sharp turian curse that would have been nothing buy a harsh caw in a human ear.

. . .

Lieutenant Maldives was lounging against one of the mess hall tables when Garrus marched into the room, her eyes on another group of officers playing cards. She sensed his shadow and looked up at him. “Hey, Garrus, want to sit with us for a-“

The words were cut off as he finished walking her way with a look that said he didn’t actually see her, grabbing her infopad off the table in front of her with a quick slide of his talons. Then he whipped around to march off again, just as silent. “All right, then.” She shared a confused look with her tablemates as he disappeared around the corner.

A second later, Garrus popped his head back into view, waggling the pad. “Hey, mind if I borrow this?” And then he was gone again.

. . .

Maldives’s infopad had been logged into the base console, synching with _Cairo’s_ network when the official vid was pushed out. It gave him a copy of their archived version to look at without resorting to his own main console. Garrus, forever cynical, forever pragmatic, had decided it would be wise to stress caution as he played around with this. But the gnaw in his gizzard had gotten stronger than ever.

Four seconds. That’s all it was. Between his copy and the official record, there was a difference of four seconds. It might mean nothing, just a trim of empty air at the beginning or the end of the footage. But he trusted to his suspicions and scanned through the vid with slow deliberation, studying each paired frame like an archaeologist.

_What can you cut out in four seconds?_ His thoughts clicked on as he examined each second, each screen, each frame becoming a glimpse of a frozen eternity. _More importantly, what can you hide in that much time?_

An hour of eye-drying scrutiny later, he had his answer. Not the trim of dead air. Four seconds of human face locked in combat terror. The gun in his hand. A spit of light as he fired. Garrus’s jaw pulled tight and he leaned in on the image, like a mantling hawk.

Who are you? What are you doing on Krent’s ship? His hand tightened around Maldives’s infopad. He forced it to relax, realizing she wouldn’t appreciate talon-scratch all over her gear.

_And why did Volansky, or someone in his office, cut you out of the official record? This comes from his office. Look at the source tagging. Son of a bitch, Seiuus. I’m going to get us some damned answers. It’s what you deserve. It’s what we all deserve_.

His breath hissed hot through his mouth’s sharpness. _Spirits. I’m here. I’m right here. Who are you, kid? I get your name, your ID, and I’ll get all my answers squared up for good. I have to be careful, though, don’t I? If I stick my neck out and don’t watch my tracks, I’ll lose my head for this._

_But I do it right, and I’m gonna take home someone else’s._

Garrus uttered a low, throaty-flanged hum. One more hunt before going home. He settled in and got ready to pull up every file, every service record, and every family tree he could possibly guess related to _Vaslui_ , Krent, and _Cairo_.

He started with Volansky. That grit in his gizzard, that damnable _hunch_ , it all said he wouldn’t have to hunt too hard.


	8. Chapter 8

8.

_There it is._

Was it as simple as that? Garrus studied the pale human face that fronted the digital dossier, feeling drained. It seemed to be. Maybe it even was.

Using captured images from his unedited copy of the _Vaslui_ ambush footage, Garrus fed an expansive facial comparison scan through the system. He started with all uploaded criminal records and then methodically worked towards the next batch of possibles, Alliance Navy files. There were several possibles that populated his crime list, vague half-caught human faces that acted alongside aliens, themselves wrapped in layers of pseuds. He dutifully logged them into a sidefile, just in case. Future reference, even.

He refused to be anything but painfully, properly procedural in this situation. He had to be, for his own sake.

The naval records were trickier. Access to them was monitored as a rule, and he wasn’t about to try to circumvent that with an anonymous router or some other illicit trick. It was the front door or nothing. Garrus had a gold-clad excuse, and maybe even Gabriel would cover for him - ask forgiveness and not permission, said the captain in his ear - but he doubted that was going to cut zero ice when Admiral Volansky got the notification that a turian was poking through the family tree. Regardless, he pushed the thought of that future, unpleasant conversation out of his mind and got to searching.

Within minutes, he’d found the face of their wolf.

. . .

James Haldrin was twenty-four year old former Navy recruit with a file on hard lockdown. There wasn’t much chance of Garrus digging his way into that. Sure, he could put in a formal request. Five minutes later the board would light up, so to speak, and he’d be in the middle of a major scene. Taking the alternative route, public records didn’t give Garrus much in the way of what the guy’s current standing was like, personally or militarily. But it did tell him the most important detail of all. His mother was Lira Haldrin. Her maiden name: Volansky. She was the deceased niece of that long-standing Alliance admiral, gone too young to a colony disease the settling humans didn’t catch up to quickly enough.

A fast scan told Garrus there were no other major relatives left. When in doubt, look down the bloodlines. _It really is that simple. A loving family member covers up the mess of his last remaining heir, for the sake of his mother. Straight out of an old human novel, an honest to spirits plain ass explanation._

_A small problem remains. These aren’t my people. If these were turians, I could just call up my own commanding officer, or anybody, really, and get the admiral pulled aside for questioning. Get an intervention going, with no face lost on either end. No reprisals, no vengeance. But these are humans. They take the command chain very differently, and… I don’t think they’re going to like in-house bad news coming from a turian._

_So. How the hell do I blow the whistle on an Alliance admiral and not get my ass kicked to the Rim doing it?_ Garrus began a nervous tap of his talon on his desk, his eyes lidded as he crunched through the new problem.

. . .

Meanwhile, Captain Gabriel had a brand new problem all to himself. His problem took the shape of a flashing red light on his command console, a persistent cry for attention. A symbol, Gabriel decided. The avatar of the admiral far on the other end of that fatline transmission, blinking just as redly, no doubt, ready to bark all his rage all over the captain.

Gabriel had his own hunch that when Volansky got him on the line, it was going to be about as pleasant as a 20th century root canal. Well, fuck it. Buy himself a few more moments of peace. He acted like he didn’t notice the light, keeping his eyes on Lieutenant Ravikumar, instead. He kept his voice mild, soothing, even. The young man always looked tense around top authority, standing legs akimbo on the other side of Gabriel’s desk, eyes down and arms locked behind him. “So that’s everything from your own ops report.”

“Yes, sir.” Gabriel watched that downcast stare flicker to the light.

“There’s nothing you want to expand on, lieutenant?” _Come on, kid, talk about baseball or something. Tell me you’re the one that gave me my third ugly scarf this week. Save your captain. Give me an extra minute of free life._

“Sir?” No, he kept watching that transmission alert. Damn.

“I’m only being thorough, lieutenant. For the sake of the official record, and of course the sake of our turian.” He put unnecessary emphasis on the words, the sharpness drawing Ravikumar’s attention to his face. Finally. “You know, there’s a slight chance Krent’s cagey enough to come up with a brutality charge when we hand him in to C-Sec, and you were first on the scene. I’m going to need rock solid witness statements.”

Ravikumar’s eyebrows lifted. “I’ve reported everything, sir. It’s all documented. Seemed like Krent took an expected amount of injury from resisting arrest. It was a clean takedown to me. Agent Garrus was calm when I arrived.”

“You’re an expert on how to read turians, Ravikumar? Maybe he looked even downright sociable.” He gave Ravikumar a wry grin, sharing with him the gentle joke.

Ravikumar seemed worried. He liked Garrus, clearly. “Sir, if Garrus hadn’t been calm, that son of a bitch would have been a hot pile of chunks.”

True, that. “I know, lieutenant.” He leaned forward with a nod, accepting his fate. “You’re dismissed.”

“Yessir.”

He slouched back in his chair, relishing the last few seconds of clean air before the door sealed behind Ravikumar. Then he took a deep, meditative breath, and hit for the transmission.

“ _Gabriel_.” Volansky’s voice was terse, a razor edge’s worth of threat. He noticed the lack of title, caught the deliberate choice behind that. _Christ, what an asshole_.

“Admiral,” he said pleasantly in response. Voice only, at least. His stare was cold, locked onto the console’s controls. A mad impulse said to hang up on the unbearable man, and he ignored it. “I apologize for the delay, sir. One of my lieutenants was filing his final report with me on our recent operation.”

Volansky, never a fuck around kind of guy, didn’t fuck around. “ _Take that turian into custody. Immediately._ ”

Gabriel licked his lips, drawing out his consideration, vamping for time while he thought. “What’s the charge, sir?”

“ _I’ve got reason to believe he sold information to Lorben Krent. It’s looking likely he’s going to try and throw suspicion on someone else. Probably Alliance, and he’s going to start with who he’s interacted with. Possibly even through me. He’s going through Navy and public files right now. I’ve had a trace set. We’ve been duped, Captain._ ” There was a wavering kind of conviction in Volansky’s voice, propped up with threat and real anger.

Something rippled down Gabriel’s back. Not fear. A flash of anger of his own. He forced his body to shift like a man considering, using it to shape the tone of his own voice. A political kind of doubt, hiding what he really felt. “That seems unlikely, Admiral. Garrus Vakarian came to us with the highest of recommendations and-“

Volansky cut him off. “ _You put him in the brig right now. I’ve already got a ship on its way to meet you for prisoner transfer. I’ll handle it from here._ ”

“Sir, this is highly irregular. I’d-“

“ _This is an order, Captain Gabriel. Do you want to push a formal objection?_ ”

He did, actually, but Gabriel also knew full well how it would go down. Son of an actual _bitch_. He forced a thin, meaningless smile across his own face, calming his voice. “No, sir. I’ll have him ready for transfer.”

“ _Volanksy out._ ”

The light went dark. Gabriel watched it to be certain the transmission was cut, letting the seething anger ripple across his skin until he decided it was safe. Then he blurted out a trace of his offense, smelling something wrong under all of this. “You old piece of shit.” He smacked his hand on his desk, fruitless but honest, and prepared to call Ravikumar back to the office.

. . .

“Garrus, I’m really sorry, but I need you to open this door.” Ravikumar’s voice sounded like it was on the edge of panic, none of it filtered by the door. “If you don’t, I’m going to have to activate the override controls and then it gets dumber than hell from there. Come on, man. Sir.”

Ravikumar had seen Garrus fight. He would never harm this crew, if it came to that, but he understood the kid’s perspective. Stuck in the middle of something he shouldn’t be. Nonetheless, he sat firm, repeatedly trying to key the Captain’s office.

This is all Volansky, I know it. I know something happened. Come on, Captain. Pick up. There was still no response. Shit. “What are your orders, kid?” He kept the anger out of his flanging voice. This wasn’t on Ravikumar.

“I told you, sir. We’ve got to take you down to the brig.”

“What’s after that?”

“I don’t know!” He sounded desperate, and terribly young.

Garrus leaned back in his chair, hand still tapping at the comm key. “Ravikumar, I’ve got two hundred credits that say I get transferred off this ship and right down a memory hole. Are you listening?” His eyes drifted towards the pieces of his battle kit he kept in-quarters. Forced his gaze back to the door. No. It’s the fault of nobody on this ship. Tamp it down, Vakarian. Not the time for anger. It was the haunting voice of his father in his mind. Irritation flared anew, and he doused it. The voice was right, this time. He tasted grit in his gizzard.

“Sir, all I can do is follow the captain’s orders. I trust him.”

“This isn’t captain’s orders, kid. This is from somewhere beyond him.”

Silence answered him. Garrus thought of Stolo, tempted by questions that he didn’t have the answers for yet. A chime from the console broke the image of the young turian. Garrus slammed a talon into it, chipping the plastic coat. “Captain.” Here, he let the terseness speak for him. What gives, sir?”

“ _There’s nothing I can do from here right now, agent. It’s cold comfort, but it’s how the Navy sometimes works. We’re only human, with human rules and human regulations._ ” Gabriel paused, letting Garrus get over his shock at the calm and easy tone, give him time to listen to the undertone. Clues, he realized. Contemplation from one agent to another. Gabriel almost drawled the next, highlighting it brighter yet. “ _You know, if I were in your place, I’d consider who to make a call to. See if I had anyone that could pull my ass out of the fire. Just a thought, Garrus._ ”

Gabriel cut out. Garrus swallowed a sharp curse, then put his anger back into thinking fast. _That’s a weird way to help, but he did. I don’t know what his angle is, but he’s trying to help and can’t do it openly. So what’s going on here, and what does that mean?_

_Goddamn Volansky. This is over Gabriel’s head, so that’s the obvious source._

He made his mind switch gears, searching for a way to match the suggestion.

_I call the turian embassy, they’re not going to be able to do much. They don’t how differently the human system works yet. Might slow things down, sure, but probably not enough. Once Volansky gets his hands on me, it’s like I already said. I’m down the hole and off the grid._

“Garrus!”

“Give me five minutes, kid. I’m not dressed.”

“ _JesUS_!” But Ravikumar backed off. He wanted to be here as much as Garrus did.

_I have no time. This is just how the Navy works_. Garrus’s eyes widened, catching something real from the nuance. Rules. Regulations. Air hissed through his teeth as he tapped along the console, pulling up the various codes for emergency communications.

Even admirals had to answer to _somebody_.

. . .

“ _This is an Arcturus emergency command line. You are not an authorized source for transmission. Sir, I need you to drop communication with this line immediately._ ”

“This _is_ an emergency, lady. I need to speak to someone in fleet command. I don’t know who. Any fleet command. Someone with full authorization over your admiralty. I don’t know how your damn system works and I don’t have time to crunch!” Garrus continued to make copies of his findings, seeding them in the system. He stashed his infopad with its untouched vid under the bed, feverishly hoping for the best. Anything to try and keep the files alive, keep the thin chain of evidence intact. _Yeah, like that’s not going to get found in a minute flat._

“ _Sir, if you continue this communication, you are committing a serious transgression of Allia-“_

“That’s the least of my problems! Listen to me, please. You’ve got a rogue admiral in the middle of aiding and abetting criminal activity, and he’s currently in the coverup phase!”

“ _Sir. This is not an authorized channel for alien communications. This transmission has now been traced and you will face official charges._ ”

“That is fantastic news, lady! Come get me! Could you put a rush order on that?!” Sarcastic anger thrummed through the air, dual-toned.

“ _Sir_ -“ The voice paused itself. Garrus heard an odd rustling through the transmission, then heard another voice come through.

“ _I have the call, Commander. Transfer it._ ” A rush of electronic clicking filled the line, and then the new voice resumed. It rumbled like gravel and rusting steel. “ _This is Admiral Hackett, commanding officer of the Fifth Fleet. Whoever the hell you are, you are making my staff extremely irritable today._ ”

Garrus took a deep breath, going for formal and sounding hurried instead. “This is Agent Garrus Vakarian, a turian investigator out of Palaven. I’m currently liased to and onboard the _SSV Cairo_ under Captain Aloysius Gabriel.”

“ _And you’re currently in my ear and not his why? You have one minute to sell me on the validity of your call, agent, and then I’m going to be sending some pissed-off dockets to Palaven._ ”

Garrus clenched the talons of his left hand into a fist, launching his prepared remarks. “Captain Gabriel has received orders from Admiral Volansky to take me into custody and bury my evidence, all to keep me from talking. The Captain can’t help me, and I need to get this out past Volansky fast. Volansky is compromised, sir, participating in a coverup meant to aid a member of his family that I can prove has been committing criminal acts as part of a major arms dealing conspiracy. He’s pushed edited footage of the _Vaslui_ attack into the official Alliance archive. I have the original, sir. Four extra seconds that show his blood relative, James Haldrin, as part of the Lorben Krent crew.”

There was a pause that felt like an hour. “ _Admiral Volansky was my mentor when I went through the academy, Agent Vakarian._ ”

It was like feeling a rope of water slip through his hands. “Sir, I-“

“ _Shut up, Vakarian._ ” There was another heavy pause. “ _Are you currently resisting arrest?_ ”

Garrus flexed his jaw, trying to think of a political way to not answer that. The hesitation spoke for him instead.

_“I see._ ” There was a sigh. “ _Turn yourself in now, agent._ ”

Garrus’s heart felt like it sank past his gizzard and down past his footclaws with no bottom in sight. Hackett wasn’t done with him yet, and the next words lifted his heart back up. It was exhausting, all these emotions. “ _Use the time to get your case presentation in order. Keep your evidence with you. Inform Cairo and your transfer ship that you have my authorization to keep all of your documentation with you and that you are now effectively my prisoner. I’ll hear your full case sometime after I talk to Captain Gabriel, and whoever’s picking you up_.”

He wanted to pass out as the admiral abruptly cut comms. The relief was like a heady drink.

Meanwhile, the scratching resumed. “Garrus!”

Garrus fought for a dry swallow, retrieving his precious infopad and ensuring he still had all his notes. He clutched the device to him like a security rope. Skin felt like it crawled along his shoulders, and he wanted nothing more but to sleep for a week. There would be time for that. Eventually. “I’m coming out, kid. Clean and unarmed.”


	9. Chapter 9

Epilogue:

The Citadel was where journeys started, and journeys ended. Garrus didn’t know which this was for him, yet. He’d been free for about three hours, after being held in a short series of brigs of varying comfort levels for about two weeks, with the last being the most cordial. Rather than a formal brig, he’d been locked into a guest room on Hackett’s own vessel. It was roomy, with seats, much to his delight, actually designed for turian butts, and even allowed him a changeable view screen with entertainments. It was still a prison, however, as he waited to hear for certain that he had been seen and believed.

He missed the _Cairo_ during that time. He thought less of Seiuus and more of the camaraderie the humans shared on Gabriel’s relaxed ship, realizing that he had begun to move back into the present, ready to look onward. Whatever that turned out to be, at least Garrus was here and now. It was healing, of a sort. He knew it would be a long time before the scars were fully healed.

He scratched at his wrist as he looked down at a flowery patch of the Presidium down below where he leaned against a railing. It wasn’t long before someone joined him, and he glanced over to see Admiral Hackett, the elder human man just as steely and rusty looking as his voice suggested. “Sir.”

“Paid your comm fine?” Brusque good humor, rarely doled out. Hackett’s advocacy of his case meant that as of this morning, all charges against Garrus had been voided out of the system. Save one, the minor infraction of barging onto a dedicated emergency line.

“Forty credits and a signature, sir.” Garrus tilted his head, indicating the fines office behind them. “Now that’s off my record, too.”

“Forty credits for a bad phone call. It’s robbery.” Hackett grunted, folding his arms atop the railing and squinting into the distance. There was no trace of a joke in that statement, which meant it probably was. “I received official word this morning. James Haldrin is in custody.” He glanced over to see Garrus studying him. “Sung like the proverbial canary.” A tweak at the lip. “No offense.”

“I had a friend that would have called that a great joke.” Garrus’s eyes went half-lidded. The ghost was only a memory now. He’d done his best by Seiuus, and now his spirit could breathe. “You would have liked him.”

“He the one why you had, of all things, a damned Hawaiian shirt in his gear? That was a good one, too. An island original. One of my guys thought about trying to buy it off of you.”

Garrus smiled. “Yes, sir. That was him. Seiuus.”

“Where this started for you.” Hackett grunted, not needing to expand on the matter. Garrus liked him. The terseness and easy understanding reminded him of some of his own turian teachers. “James casually gave up his grand-uncle, Peter Volansky, too, as if we didn’t already have the admiral dead to rights. The loyalty Volansky gave to the boy was not returned. Bitter thing, isn’t it?”

Garrus chewed on that. “It’s a paradox, yes, sir, but maybe not as much for me. A turian caught between family and our people’s honor has a hard choice, but a clear one. A human? There’s a lot I don’t understand yet.” That was a loaded sentence. He let it sit there to be studied.

Hackett nodded, clearly understanding. “Volansky’s been stripped of decades’ worth of reputation, much less his title. Most of his friends have abandoned him. He tried to appeal to me, and he’s the one that taught me in naval ethics, back when I was a young man and needed to find my own rudder. I’m afraid I looked disgusted with him, and that hurts us both. Prison is an afterthought in this case, agent. Volansky thrived on his duty in space. Without it, he’s been given a life sentence harsher than any steel bars could illustrate. He won’t last long.”

“That… makes it sound much harder than what I had in mind.”

“It is. It isn’t perfect, but it will do. James will undergo formal sentencing next week. He won’t get any leniency for testifying against Krent, and Krent isn’t going to get a single goddamn thing in his favor. Both Captain Gabriel and I are seeing to that.” Hackett shifted his weight against the rail, looking towards the false light source that made the Presidium gardens feel like a warm and early spring morning. “That good, Vakarian?”

“I’m content.”

Hackett nodded. “Gabriel sent an updated recommendation to Palaven last night. If it talked about you any brightly, it’d get outright sappy. You get the package he sent? He shot me a picture of it, without context.”

Garrus broke into a laugh. “Three of the ugliest scarves in the galaxy. I told him it was cheating.”

“Someone’s going to have to explain the joke to me sometime.” Hackett pushed away from the railing and locked his arms behind his back, jerking his chin by way of gesturing for Garrus to follow him. “He sent a copy to the turian ambassador here, too. Of the recommendation, not the scarves. That’d be an act of war, I reckon.”

“Sparatus?”

“Him. Not an easygoing man. Not a big fan of our people, if I may be honest, which is his right. But he seems approving of how everything went down.” Hackett led them down a clogged market street, stepping deftly out of the way of a hurrying volus. “He backed a suggestion Gabriel had, which he’d already run past me and I signed off on. Your men at Palaven, too.” Hackett shrugged. “So I suppose it has to go to the person that really matters, next.”

“Sir?”

“Let me ask you something.” Hackett didn’t wait for an agreement, and he didn’t look back as they continued walking. “What drove you to keep looking after you locked down Krent? What made you sit down and say for certain that there was more here, and that it needed daylight?”

Garrus frowned, thinking about that. But not for long. “Real problems are rarely ended with one solution. Crime is no different. You stop one drug dealer, you stop one murderer, you clog up one trafficker’s lane, that’s a good day’s work. But the next day, you’re still out there, looking for the next broken link in the chain until you find the source. And even then, that won’t end all the problems. There’ll always be more to do, even beyond police. Mentors to help teach what’s right. Services to make sure people aren’t desperate. And people will still do terrible things sometimes. That’s a digression, sir, but what I mean is - the job never ends, and I never feel like it does. I’m always looking for the next step. For the victims left behind, to get that pain at least to a minimum. To get as much safety out there.

“We got Krent. That’s millions of credits worth of real damage off the spacelanes, lives saved and avenged. Krent had that support network. Some of it’ll fall apart on its own. Alliance will uncover the rest. But I saw a part of it in action. Saw a part of it that kept going unnoticed, began to wonder why. So I hunted it down. Until I was done.”

“No matter the risk to yourself.”

“No, I knew it was risky. I didn’t want to be the one in trouble for it. I’m still… maybe upset that’s how it went down. That to get justice, I had to look like a criminal first. That a human thought to use me, strike at my reputation, to save himself. I wouldn’t do that to someone else, sir. That’s not who I am. It’s a different kind of treason. But I felt what I was doing was right.” Garrus trailed off, thinking over his words. They were a little more passionate than he usually liked, but maybe it was time to change. For the sake of things he’d learned and the people he had known. “I wanted to do my best. For the truth. And damn the rest.”

Hackett nodded, looking as pleased as he could under the natural hard crags of his face. They went up a wide public staircase, through another botanical garden. The chatter and smells of street food and day-hour markets faded. Garrus realized he had no idea where he was. Hackett began to talk again. “That’s a valuable thing, agent, no matter the species. That urge to do what’s right, no matter what. It can’t always be trained. Sometimes it’s just got to be there, born in the bones and in the soul. The spirit, if you prefer.”

“I’m not exactly religious.” He couldn’t help but sound wry. “But I take your meaning, sir, and I agree.”

“I haven’t been to a service since I was ten and my mother dragged me by the ear. But some things will always give a man comfort, and I’ll respect that, too.” Hackett dismissed the tangent with a shrug. “Point I’m meandering towards is, when you see someone doing their best, going above and beyond their ability, using what’s been given to them and more to do what’s right, well, the wise thing to do is give them _more_ tools to get the job done.”

“Sir?”

“Technically Captain Gabriel is one sponsor, a valuable cross-species one, considering the local politics. Your commander on Palavan, Tureth, is another. But off the books, I pushed for advocacy here. Your casework impressed me, agent, no less because of it being under some extraordinary duress.”

“No matter the hard answers, sir?”

“Volansky was a friend.” Something softened in that rocky voice. “It’s hard to acknowledge that, now. But he was, and he crossed the line for reasons that I suppose I understand, but would never approve of. Not like this.” Hackett sighed at the top of the stairs, letting Garrus realize they were in a municipal and judiciary sector, one of much higher prestige than the tiny office that handled small-claims fines. “It makes it all the more important to recognize the truth. _Because_ it’s difficult sometimes.” He shook his head. “I’m rambling.”

Garrus thought he understood. “It always feels the same, losing a friend. Whatever the reason, there’s a hole after. It’s important to find a way to honor that emptiness, and move on in a way that makes that loss meaningful.”

Hackett gave him a stony look that dissolved quickly into a warm, wry smirk. “Thought you just told me you weren’t the spiritual kind, Vakarian.”

Garrus spluttered.

“I’m fucking with you.” Hackett snorted. “Don’t tell anyone. They wouldn’t believe you, anyway.” He gestured at the gleaming offices beyond them, as a shocked understanding dawned on Garrus. “Come on, agent. We’ve got an appointment, and we’re right on time.”

. . .

The Executor’s office reflected the stoic, almost righteous nature of its occupant with stark brilliance. Venari Pallin rose from his seat with a cursory but polite glance at the human admiral first, and then with something like real warmth towards Garrus. Then he looked back down at his documentation. “Vakarian, Garrus, Palaven boot 4453. Father, Castis.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Castis is still one of my active agents.” Executor Pallin paused, letting that fill the air. “This interview was not arranged or suggested by him.” He looked at Garrus, wanting his answer.

“It would be a surprise to me if he had, sir.” Garrus dug around for a good, tactical way to put it. “My father believes in earning a place on your own terms.”

Pallin studied him, humming low to himself as he assessed the answer. An almost imperceptible nod revealed that it had been a good one. “Several advocates have suggested that you have done precisely that, Garrus Vakarian. What is your answer to that statement?”

“I am… greatly honored and humbled by that belief, and I would continue to work to be worthy of it.” He resisted the urge to fidget like a child, to clack his talons or shift a foot claw. All these things would be noticed. Next to him, the admiral was a statue.

“Hmmmmm.” Pallin sat back down with regal posturing, hands on each armrest and his eyes still fixed on Garrus’s.

Inspiration hit. A little dramatic, but important moments like this one called for it. “It is a work that I think would never be completed, but is forever worthy of the attempt, sir.”

In his mind, Seiuus flashed him a thumb’s up and a cheeky grin. The lost turian wore his ugly flowered shirt, and three even uglier scarves draped around his thin neck. Long ago and from far away, his old friend beamed at him, telling him he was doing it right, and to always follow his heart, his soul - and his hunch.

Damn the man. Garrus felt something tremble inside, and kept the tear hidden away for later.

Executor Pallin stared at him, clearly pleased by the followup. He leaned forward, an arm outstretched in a traditional beckon. “Agent Garrus Vakarian. I welcome you, formally, to Citadel Security.”

_~Fin_

_. . ._

_But where knowledge of trickery is evenly distributed, honesty not infrequently prevails. ~ Dashiell Hammett_

_. . ._

2009-2019, all rights to Bioware and associated parties. Lord, I know, right?


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